Prof. Mihaela Irimia

Professor of English, Emerita
BA, University of Bucharest, 1973
PhD, University of Bucharest, 1983
mihaela.irimia@lls.unibuc.ro
Office hours: by appointment

COURSES TAUGHT

History of Ideas – Cultural Identity I & II

BIO & PUBLICATIONS

A specialist in British Studies, Prof. Mihaela Irimia teaches Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature and Culture, Cultural Theory, History of Ideas, and Cultural Studies at undergraduate, graduate, MA and Doctoral level. She is the Director of Studies of the British Cultural Studies Centre (BCSC), Director of the Centre of Excellence for the Study of Cultural Identity, and Vice-President of the Romanian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Her professional affiliations comprise: the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), the Romanian Philological Association, the Romanian Association for English and American Studies (RAEAS), the Hellenic Association for the Study of English (HASE), the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS), the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS), the Romanian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the German Society for English Romanticism, the Romanian Comparative Literature Association. She has been Fulbright Professor at Harvard, fellow of St. John’s College Oxford, research fellow at Yale, Baylor, the Bodleian Library, the Taylor Institution Oxford, and is currently alumna of New Europe College.

She has been Visiting Professor or/and given invited papers at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Sheffield University, University of Wales Cardiff, Nottingham University, University of Ulster Coleraine, Trinity College Dublin, Harvard University, Yale University, Oslo Universitat,  Helsinki Universitet, Universität Heidelberg, Ludwig-Maximilans-Universität München, Gerhard-Mercator-Universität Duisburg, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Universität Wien, Jagelonska Univerzita, Univerzita Gdańsk, Central European University (CEU) Budapest, Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem (ELTE) Budapest, Università degli Studi di Milano, Università Gabriele d’Annunzio Pescara, Università La Sapienza Roma, Università di Padova, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Universidad de Zaragoza, Universidade Clássica de Lisboa, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Université Paris XII, Université Marc Bloch Strasbourg, Université d’Orleans, Université de Franche-Comté Besançon, Aristotelis Panepistimiu Thessaloniki, Boğazici Universitesi Istanbul, Beykent Universitesi Istanbul, University of the Gulf for Science and Technology, Kuwait.

She has attended prestigious international conferences in Dublin, Budapest, London, New York, Rostock, Brighton, Bristol, Miami, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Athens, New Orleans, Rome, Graz, Heidelberg, Duisburg, Cardiff, Erfurt, Pescara, Helsinki, Strasbourg, Los Angeles, Vienna, Oxford, Padua, Zaragoza, Cambridge, New Haven, Lisbon, Paris, Halle, Munich, Tubingen, Giessen. Her activity at ESSE events includes papers given in conference sessions, panels and seminars, session chairing and a subplenary keynote lecture.

She has organized international interdisciplinary conferences under the CESIC aegis or/and jointly with first-hand universities in such places as: Lisbon (2015), Kuwait City (2016), Budapest (2016), Bochum (2017), Venice (2017), Gdansk (2018), London (2018), Istanbul (2019), Rome (2019) et al.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books and edited volumes

• Literature and Cultural Memory (co-ed. with Dragoș Manea and Andreea Paris), Amsterdam – New York: Brill, 2017.
• Literary Topoi, Vision and Techniques in Cultural Context (ed.), Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2015.
• Literature and the Long Modernity (co-ed. with Andreea Paris), Amsterdam – New York: Rodopi, 2014.
• European Romanticism: A Reader (member of editorial team, ed. Stephen Prickett and Simon Heines), London – New Delhi – New York – Sydney: Bloomsbury 2014.
• Author(ity) and the Canon between Institutionalization and Questioning: Literature from High to Late Modernity (co-ed. with Dragoș Ivana), Bucureşti: Institutul Cultural Român, 2011.
• Imitatio – Inventio: The Rise of ‘Literature’ from Early to Classic Modernity (co-ed. with Dragoș Ivana), Bucureşti: Institutul Cultural Român, 2010.
• Literary into Cultural History (co-ed. with Dragoș Ivana), Bucureşti: Institutul Cultural Român, 2008.
• Lures and Ruses of Modernity / Leurres et ruses de la modernité (ed.), Bucureşti: Institutul Cultural Român, 2007.
• The Stimulating Difference: Avatars of a Concept, Bucureşti: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, 2005.
• Dicţionarul universului britanic (A Dictionary of Britishness), Bucureşti: Humanitas, 2002.

Journal articles and book chapters

• “Decebalus’s Ancestral Voice Prophesying National Unity: Romanian Romanticism and the Politics of Ethno-Genetic Identity”, in The Politics of Romanticism (eds Pascal Fischer & Christoph Houswitschka), Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2019, 163-170.
• “I spy with my little eye something complicitly simple”: Eighteenth-Century Caricature Tricks”, in Complicity and the Politics of Representation (eds Cornelia Wächter & Robert Wirth), London & New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, 159-176.
• “Rus in Urbe: Parks in Eighteenth-Century Cities”, in Resistance and the City: Challenging Urban Space (eds Christoph Ehland & Pascal Fischer), Leiden/Boston: Brill – Rodopi, 2018, 47-59.
• “Trading ‘several laughable Subjects, droll Figures, and sundry Characters”, in Trading Women, Traded Women: A Historical Scrutiny of Gendered Trading (eds Gönül Bakay & Mihaela Mudure) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017, 147-168.
• “The Arts Meet the Sciences in Exploring the Continent: Some Grand Tour Imagology”, Literature, Science and the Arts vol. published by Universidade do Porto, CETAPS and Cambridge Scholars, 2017, 94-115.
• “The Long Shadow of the Sonnets in Portuguese and Romanian Literatures”, in Shakespeare 400 in Romania (eds M. Nicolaescu, Oana-Alis Zaharia, Andrei Nae), Bucureşti: Editura Universității din București, 2017, 313-330.
• “… these foolish, yet dangerous Books”: Fashionable Sociability and the Circulating Library in Classic Modernity” (ed. Ana-Karina Schneider), in East-West Cultural Passage, Vol. 16, iss. 1 /2016, Sibiu, 9-33.
• “From hand to hand, from country to country: What the Gold Coin Knew and What It Said”, in The Silent Life of Things: Reading and Representing Commodified Objecthood (eds Daniela Rogobete, Jonathan P.A. Sell, Alan Munton), Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, 33-52.
• “Dante, ‘The Greatest Figure of World Literature’”, Dante in the Nineteenth Century (eds Adina Ciugureanu & Stephen Prickett), in International Journal of Cross-Cultural Studies and Environmental Communication, Vol. 4, issue 1, 2015, 77-90.
• “No chimney half so foul appears, as doth the human heart”: (S)weeping the City Clean from Blake to Popular Culture’, in Romantic City Scapes (eds Jens Martin Gurr & Berit Michael, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013, 175-190.
• ‘“The true idea of a literary journal is to give the history of the Republic of Letters”: The Empire of Truth and Reason and the New “Literary” (Re)public,’ in Representações da República (eds Luís Manuel Bernardo, Leonor Santa Bárbara), Lisboa: Edições Húmus, 2013; 381-396.
• “In England you have wealth… Here, we have the sun”: Lawrence and the Spirit of Place, in Lake Garda: Gateway to D.H. Lawrence’s Voyage to the Sun (ed. Nick Ceramella), Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, 151-166.
• “The Classic Modern Canon and the Disciplinary Separation”, in The Canonical Debate Today: Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries (eds Liviu Papadima, David Damrosch & Theo D’haen), Amsterdam: Rodopi; /New York, NY: Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 149, 2011, 205-214.
• “From London into the Wide World and Back: Guineaing It in Eighteenth-Century England”, in Identidade e Cidadania da antiguidade aos nossos dias, Porto:  Papiro Editora, 2010, 219-232.
• “The Ineffectual Angel of Political Hijacking: Shelley in Romanian Culture,” in The Reception of Shelley in Europe (eds. Michael Rossington & Susanne Schmid), London & New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008, 127-145.
• “The Byron Phenomenon in Romanian Culture,” in The Reception of Byron in Europe (ed. Richard Cardwell), London & New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004, 188-201.

She has authored some 250 articles and studies, translations of Romanian literature into English, as well as translations of British and American literature into Romanian.