Assistant Lecturer in English
BA, University of Bucharest, 2013
MA, University of Bucharest, 2015
PhD, University of Bucharest, 2020
alexandra.bacalu@lls.unibuc.ro
Office hours: by appointment
COURSE TAUGHT
Cultural Genealogies (I): The Care of the Self
BIO & PUBLICATIONS
Alexandra Bacalu is an Assistant Lecturer at the English Department of the University of Bucharest, where she teaches eighteenth-century British literature (BA level) and the history of the care of the self (MA level). Her research focuses on early modern intellectual history, with a particular interest in questions surrounding human nature and faculty psychology in literary, philosophical, and medical contexts. In 2020 she defended her PhD thesis, Eighteenth-Century Stoic Poetics: Shaftesbury, Akenside, and the Discipline of the Imagination, which traces a neglected conjunction of poetic and moral-philosophical discourses in the poetics of Lord Shaftesbury and Mark Akenside, arguing that Stoic exercises for disciplining the imagination play a significant role in the emergence of eighteenth-century poetic notions of imaginative freedom and creativity. She is currently a member of two UEFISCDI research projects investigating long eighteenth-century articulations of the act of thinking, Between Truth and Freedom: Enlightenment Answers to ‘Thinking for Oneself’ (PN-III-P4-ID-PCE2020-2579; PI: Dr. Tinca Prunea) and The Art of Thinking in the Enlightenment: An Interdisciplinary Reappraisal (PN-III-P4-PCE-2021-1407; PI: Dr. Sorana Corneanu).
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Book
Journal articles and book chapters
“Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771)” in Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century, Katrin Berndt and Alessa Johns eds., Boston, Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2022, ISBN: 9783110649765
(co-author with Andrei Nae) “Toward a Reconsideration of Hypermediacy: Immersion in Survival Horror Games and Eighteenth-Century Novels” in Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies, Sascha Pöhlmann ed., Boston, Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2019, 133-152, ISBN: 9783110659405
“The City and its Therapeutic Dimension in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy”, University of Bucharest Review: Cultural Representations of the City VI.2, 2016, 113-122
“From Tranquillity to Agitation: Remedies Using the Imagination and the Passions in Early Modern Thought”, Society and Politics: Identity, Reason and Passions in Early Modern Thought, X.2, 2016, 36-55
British Cultural Studies 