My name is Mihai Olaru. I was born in Cluj, Romania and I graduated the Babeş-Bolyai University from my hometown. Between 2005 and 2013 I was enrolled at Central European University in Budapest where I defended my MA thesis (2006) and my doctoral thesis (2013).
My research explores the link between the collection and storing of social knowledge and the exercise of state power in Wallachia from the late 17th to 1831. Focusing on the emergence, content and especially employment of registers in administration and justice and on the collection of geographical information, I contend that the nature of the Wallachian state during the mentioned period was significantly altered. On the one hand, the development of means of storing information increased the infrastructural reach of the state. On the other, the centralization of administrative knowledge constituted the state as an impersonal, impartial and objective entity, detached from the person of the prince and from sectional interests. By making these two claims, my study goes against two bodies of literature: the historiography on the Phanariot period and the theories of early-modern state formation.
