Valentin Sandulescu

Brief Information

Valentin Adrian Săndulescu is a doctoral student at the Department of History, Central European University (2003-present). His PhD work centres on Revolutionsing Romania from the Right: The Regenerative Project of the Romanian Legionary Movement and its Failure (1927- 1937). He received his BA degree from the Faculty of History, University of Bucharest (2002), and his MA degree in history from Central European University (2003). He is the bearer of the Academic Achievement Award for First-Year Doctoral Students, Central European University (2005), a Gast- Stipendiat at the International Graduate School in History (BIGH), University of Bielefeld, Germany (2005), and was Assistant Researcher for the grant Debating Fascism: Historiography in Bulgaria and Romania, CEU (2008), to mention a few.

Valentin Adrian Săndulescu has held a teaching assistantship for the class in Cultural and Social History of Eastern Europe at the History Department (CEU, winter term 2008); he has been an expert at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Bucharest, and head coordinator
of the Translation and Publication Support Program (2006-2007), President of the Society of Historical Studies ERASMUS and Editor-in-Chief of its journal, ERASMUS, (2001-2002); as well as Editor of CARNIVAL, the Journal of the International Students of History Association).

Valentin Adrian Săndulescu has contributed with chapters and articles to several academic collections in Romanian and English.

… Joining CAS as a fellow I expect to experience the fortunate mix of ‘business and pleasure’, i.e. a highly stimulating academic endeavor combined with a friendly environment that would result in steady, long-lasting links. I think that the fellows’ diverse range of topics and academic backgrounds would prove to be a valuable asset, especially because they are linked together by the theoretical framework of the program. I hope that the entangled experiences and shared (hi)stories of the fellows will prove focus points for plenty of meaningful, informal discussions …

Valentin Sandulescu

Projects

Time to Regenerate: Visions of the Past, Present and Future – a Look at the Intellectual Foundations and Dynamics of the Romanian Iron Guard

Regimes of Historicity and Discourses of Modernity and Identity, 1900-1945, in East-Central, Southeastern and Northern Europe

Project Outline

Despite several decades of intensive research, the study of fascism as a major political phenomenon of the twentieth century is still far from reaching its endpoint. While the literature on paradigmatic cases such as the Italian or the German one is abundant, ‘peripheral', yet salient cases, such as Romanian fascism remain ess researched. The current research focuses on the nature and manifestations of Romanian fascism, by positioning it in the history of regenerative, evolutionary projects that matured in the interwar period as an alternative to what was considered the decaying system of fin-de-siècle liberalism, while xamining how they were rooted in the intellectual milieu around 1900.

The starting research hypothesis assesses fascism as a ‘coherent body of thought', a ‘form of political modernism in its own right', which presented itself as a revolutionary deology, that put forward the necessity to reshape the ‘national self' and regenerate ‘the decay' of the national body by bringing about a ‘new man' and ‘new temporal order'. Analysing fascism from within, and considering it as a solid ideological construct, the project expects to better understand the diverse intellectual and social support it garnered, and the mass appeal that assured its political success in various contexts.

The primary focus of the research is an indepth look at what I have termed ‘the other green intellectuals', who sympathised with, and in some cases even joined, the Iron Guard (the most important fascist movement in interwar Romania) and had a genuine impact on its development. The project looks at their radical response to he temporal crisis that interwar Romania had to face, how that time horizon shaped their political views, and their ideas for an alternative extreme right-wing revolutionary ay towards modernity.

The path that the study intends to pursue is an analysis of the public stands these intellectuals took in relation to Romania's past, present and future, and how they envisaged the interplay between modernity and historicity. The kind of stand may be tracked down in some underexplored primary sources, such as the legionary and pro-legionary press and pamphlets from late 1920s to early 1940s.

The project also looks into the external intellectual influences that marked the discourse of this cohort, given the fact that, with few exceptions, most of them
were trained by, or were in close contact with academic institutions based especially in Germany, Italy, and France. By adding the analysis of their interaction in certain groups such as the ‘Axa' group, the ‘Criterion group, or the ‘Rânduiala' group, the research hopes to develop their comprehensive intellectual biographies while mapping their common views of the role of historicity in the debate focused on modernity and nation building.

Former Fellows

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