Ana-Maria Taranu

Ana Țăranu (she/her) is a EUTOPIA-funded PhD candidate with the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and the Department of Film and Media at Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania. In her doctoral research, she traces the post-socialist affirmation of the radical right in Romania, working at the intersection of cultural studies, intellectual history and sociology of media.

Since 2023, she has been a research assistant in the NextGenerationEU-funded grant Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis. She is on the organising board of the Historical Materialism Cluj / Kolozsvár conference. In 2025, she was a Visiting Student at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the European University Institute (Florence, Italy).

Peer-reviewed publications (selected):

Ţăranu, Ana. 2025. “‘If There’s Too Few of Us, We’ll Make Films.’ Cinematic Populism and Political Grievance in Recent Eastern European Cinema.” Eastern European Screen Studies, August, 1–19. doi:10.1080/29974828.2025.2532966.

Ţăranu, Ana. 2025. “Recurring exceptionalism. Protochronism, cultural autarky, and national identity in (post)socialist Romania.” Studies in Eastern European Thought. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-025-09729-7

Țăranu, Ana and Claudiu Turcuș. “Exceptionally dysfunctional. The reception of American literary and political imagery in the interwar Romanian press” in Translations and Semi-Peripheral Cultures. Worlding the Romanian Novel in the Modern Literary System, Alex Goldiș and Ștefan Baghiu (eds.), Peter Lang, 2022: 131-149.

Țăranu, Ana. “Genre Practice in Literary Historiography: A Romanian Case”. Transilvania, no. 7-8 (2021): 45-51. https://doi.org/10.51391/trva.2021.07-08.05.

Țăranu, Ana. “Signifying the Self: Cultural Trauma and Mechanisms of Memorialization in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory 7.1 (2021).

Conference presentations, workshops and talks (selected):

"(Un)Reasonable Bedfellows. Technocratic centrism, austerity and the rise of the Romanian far-right." Joint Sessions on Critical Europe, LSE European Institute, London, February 2026.

"Anti-fascism as anti-communism. Hegemonic memory regimes and the institutionalisation of the Romanian far-right." Historical Materialism Annual Conference, SOAS, London, November 2025.

"Vignettes of Illiberal Nostalgia: The Historical Entrepreneurship of the Romanian Far-Right in 2024 Electoral Campaigning." Memory Studies Association Annual Conference, Prague, July 2025.

"Bessarabia is Romania. National Restoration and the Unionist Rhetoric of the Romanian Populist Far-Right." ASEN Conference on Nationalism & Borders, organised by the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN), Central European University, Budapest, April 2025.

Representations of the Nation Across Shifting Mediascapes. CEECON (DGO-Congress of Central and East European Studies), Freie Universität Berlin, October 2024.

Invited speaker. “Making Sense of the Romanian Elections. Political, institutional, and regional implications.” Panel organised by the International Relations Working Group, European University Institute, December 2024. https://www.eui.eu/events?id=575158

Doctoral Advanced Fellowship Talk. "Populist Narrative and Representations of the Weak State in Recent Eastern European Cinema." BBU, November 2024.