Prof. Dragoş Petrescu

Professor of Comparative Politics
BA, University of Bucharest, 1997
MA, Central European University (CEU) Budapest, 1998
PhD, Central European University (CEU) Budapest, 2003
dragos.petrescu@fspub.unibuc.ro 
Office hours: by appointment

COURSE TAUGHT

Political Discourse and Cultural Identity

BIO & PUBLICATIONS

Dragoş Petrescu is Professor of Comparative Politics at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest (since 2015). Between 2003 and 2006, he served as Director of the Romanian Institute of Recent History (IRIR). From March 2006 and January 2010, he was a Member of the Board of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS) In Bucharest, and from January 2010 to March 2018 he served as Chairman of the said Board. His research interests are related to the comparative analysis of the communist regimes in East-Central Europe, the post-1989 transitions to democracy and the post-2015 authoritarian backslidings in the region, with a special emphasis on transitional justice, identity politics, institutionalization of memory and rise of populism.

For a detailed CV, see my Academia.edu profile.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books and edited volumes

  • Entangled Revolutions: The Breakdown of the Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 2014).
  • Explaining the Romanian Revolution of 1989: Culture, Structure, and Contingency (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 2010).
  • Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian Case Studies (Budapest: Regio Books, 2001) (co-editor).

Articles and book chapters

  • “Romania, Thirty Years After: The Bloody Revolution of 1989 and the Refusal of the Populist Consensus,” Arhivele Totalitarismului (Bucharest), No. 104–105, 3–4/2019, pp. 229–251.
  • “Dealing with the Securitate Files in Post-Communist Romania: Legal and Institutional Aspects,” in Florian Kührer-Wielach and Michaela Nowotnick, eds., Aus den Giftschränken des Kommunismus: Methodische Fragen zum Umgang mit Überwachungsakten in Zentral- und Südosteuropa (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2018), pp. 43–60.
  • “Public Exposure Without Lustration,” in Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu, eds., Justice, Memory and Redress in Romania: New Insights (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), pp. 124–144.
  • “Closely Watched Tourism: The Securitate as Warden of Transnational Encounters, 1967–69,” Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 50, No. 2 (2015): pp. 337–353.
  • “The Canon of Remembering Romanian Communism: From Autobiographical Recollections to Collective Representations” (with Cristina Petrescu), in Maria Todorova, Augusta Dimou and Stefan Troebst, eds., Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experiences in Southeast Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2014), pp. 43–70.
  • “The Revolution of 1989 and the Rashomon Effect: Recollections of the Collapse of Communism in Romania,” in Maria Todorova, Augusta Dimou and Stefan Troebst, eds., Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experiences in Southeast Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014), pp. 533–548.
  • “Selective Memories of Communism: Remembering Ceauşescu’s ‘Socialism’ in Post-1989 Romania,” in Agnieszka Gasior, Agnieszka Halemba and Stefan Troebst, eds., Gebrochene Kontinuitäten: Transnationalităt in den Erinnerungskulturen Ostmittleeuropas im 20. Jahrhundert  (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2014), pp. 305–321.
  • “The Piteşti Syndrome: A Romanian Vergangenheitsbewältigung?” (with Cristina Petrescu), in Stefan Troebst, ed., Postdiktatorische Geschichtskulturen im Süden und Osten Europas: Bestandsaufnahme und Forschungsperspektiven (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010), pp. 502–618.
  • “Legitimacy, Nation-Building and Closure: Meanings and Consequences of the Romanian August of 1968,“ in M. Mark Stolarik, ed., The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968: Forty Years Later (Mundelein, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2010), pp. 237–259.
  • “Community-Building and Identity Politics in Gheorghiu-Dej’s Romania, 1956–64,” in Vladimir Tismăneanu, ed., Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009), pp. 401–422.
  • “Retribution, Remembering, Representation: On Romania’s Incomplete Break with the Communist Past” (with Cristina Petrescu), in Gerhard Besier and Katarzyna Stokłosa, eds., Geschichtsbilder in den postdiktatorischen Ländern Europas: Auf de Suche nach historisch-politischen Identitäten (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2009), pp. 155–182.