Dr. Ioana Zirra

Associate Professor of English
BA, University of Bucharest, 1981
MA in British Cultural Studies, University of Warwick, UK, 1993
PhD, University of Bucharest, 2005
ioana.zirra@lls.unibuc.ro
Office hours: by appointment via skype

COURSES TAUGHT

Cultural anthropology

National Identities in the British Isles II: Ireland

Celtic Cultural Memory (co-taught with Dr James Brown)

BIO & PUBLICATIONS

Ioana Zirra has been teaching since 1991 at the University of Bucharest, British Civilization, British and American modernism, Victorian literature (especially the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning), Irish cultural identity and literature, W.B. Yeats, the Belfast poets (especially Seamus Heaney), and, since 2014, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Her research interests also include the rhetoric of the essay, modernity theory, theory of literature, cultural identity. Together with Professors Eve Patten (currently at Trinity College Dublin), Mihaela Anghelescu-Irimia, and Daniela Davidescu-Brown, she was connected to the beginnings of the British Cultural Studies MA programme at the University of Bucharest, in 1994-5, further to the MA scholarship in Cultural Studies provided, in 1993, by the University of Warwick for 10 Romanian academics. Her interest in Irish Studies and literature is due to attending the 1991 international IASAIL Conference in Utrecht and, especially, the one semester research scholarship jointly granted by the British Council, Belfast and the Institute of Irish Studies, the Queen’s University, Belfast, 1995, which was pursued in 1996, at the same venue, as part of collective international Irish Studies Programme. In addition to producing handbooks for the various subjects taught and editing the proceedings of the Annual International Conference of the English Department, University of Bucharest  (as a member of whose organizing committee she was between 2004-2018). Ioana Zirra served as a peer reviewer with the ELALT5 Novi Sad, between 2013-2015. And between 2008-9, she was a member of the CNCSIS type A grant titled ODISEI, Omogenitate, diversitate, identitate – Spaţiu european şi integrare

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books and edited volumes

  • The Literary Avatars of Christian Sacramentality, Theology and Practical Life in Recent Modernity (co-ed. with Madeline Potter), Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016.
  • British Literature in the Twentieth Century: Themes, Paradigms, Authors, Approaches, Bucureşti:  Editura Universităţii Bucureşti, 2014.
  • T. S. Eliot, Opere poetice 1909-1962 (co-ed. with Șerban Foarță et al.),  Bucureşti: Humanitas, 2011.
  • Contributions of the British 19th Century, the Victorian Age, to the History of Literature and Ideas, Bucureşti:  Editura Universităţii Bucureşti, 2011, 2006, 2003 (© 2000).
  • Victorian Literature Reconstructions, vol. 2 of Contributions, Bucureşti:  Editura Universităţii Bucureşti, 2011.
  • British Culture and Civilization Themes, Bucureşti: Editura Oscar Print, 2004, 2003.

Journal articles and book chapters

  • “Digital Tracing of the ‘Parallactic Drift of the Socalled Fixed Stars’ in James Joyce’s Ulysses”, in Choiński, Michał, Małgorzata Cierpisz (eds.) New Perspectives in English and American Studies, Krakow: Jagiellionian University Press, 2020, 470-477.
  • “Silence and Cunning: the Irish Exile’s Postcreative Immortality in ‘Oxen of the Sun’”, in  The Joys of Exile – Joyce Studies in Italy, vol 20, Roma: Editoriale Anicia, 2018, 179-200.
  • “Literary into Popular into National Memory: the Art of Blasphemy in  Romanian Novels of 2012”, in Mihaela Irimia, Dragoş Manea, Andreea Paris (eds.), Literature and Cultural Memory, Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2017, 344-361.
  • “Targets and Post-Humanistic Consequences Of Heidegger’s ‘Letter On Humanism’”, in Evi Sampanikou (ed.) Audiovisual Posthumanism, Cambridge Scholars, 2017, 75-86.
  • “Poetic Kairoi in ‘Lapis Lazuli’ and ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ by Yeats and in Seamus Heaney’s ‘A Snowshoe’ (Shelf Life VI), in I. Zirra, Madeline Potter (eds.), The Literary Avatars of Christian Sacramentality, Theology and Practical Life in Recent Modernity, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016, 31-47.
  • “Paronomastic Filiation, Vertical Intertextuality and the Family Reunion of Mr Bloom’s  and Stephen’s Shakespearean Ghosts in the Circe Psychodrama” in John McCourt (ed.) Shakespearean Joyce Joycean Shakespeare (Joyce Studies in Italy, Nr. 18), 2016, 193-205 .
  • “James Joyce’s Ironical Memory: Jungian versus Parallactic Literary (Re)Cognition in the Cultural-Gift Novel Titled Ulysses” în Miroslawa Buchholtz, Marta Sibierska (eds.) Insights and Outlooks: Cognitive Approches to Culture, History, Psychology, and Language Teaching, Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, Vol XII, 2015, Torún, Nicolaus Copernicus University, 2015, 111-126.
  • “Free Preaching as a Post-Denominational Phenomenon in Victorian Literature. The Post- Religious Profile of the Victorian Age”, in Gabriela Blebea-Nicolae (ed.), Credinţa în epoca secularizării, Bucureşti: Editura ARCB, 2015, 237-262.
  • “Glocalizing Post-Imperial British Travel Literature: Patrick McGuiness’s Account of the Romanian Watershed in The Last Hundred Days” în Adriana Babeţi, Dumitru Tucan, Gabriela Glăvan, Radu Pavel Gheo (eds.), Cartografii literare: Regional, Naţional, European, Global, Timişoara: Editura Universităţii de Vest, 2015, 326-343.
  • “Is Romanian Postcommunist Identity Hyphenated in the Same Way as the Poststructuralist, Postcolonial and Post-traumatic Hyphenated Identity Foregrounded by Emily Apter’s New Comparative Literature Outlined in The Translation Zone?” , in Adrian Tudurachi, Antonio Patraş, Ligia Tudurachi (eds.) Dacoromania literaria, Institutul de lingvistică şi istorie Literară “Sextil Puşcariu Cluj-Napoca, No 2/2015, 117-133.
  • “Accommodation and Othering: Transnational Premediation in the Modernist Epics  “The Waste Land” and Ulysses”, University of Bucharest Review 2014, “Transnational Dimensions of Literature and the Arts”, Vol. IV/2014, no. 1 (new series),University of Bucharest Review, 45-52.