Romania took hold of my heart in 2015 and since then has consumed my mind and soul. As with any genuine commitment, my relationship with this beautiful, complex country has grown and deepened over time as I have learned of its many tragedies, as well as its many triumphs. I have surrendered myself to Romania. [...] As I continue my Romanian journey, I marvel over the resiliency and fortitude of the people. I am fortunate to have developed close relationships, familial in many ways, with many Romanians. And I am eternally grateful to have been granted a Fulbright and honored to become part of this amazing community.
New Book by Fulbright Alumna Cristina A. Bejan
U.S. Fulbright Alumna Cristina A. Bejan recently published a book titled Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
From the back cover of the book: “In 1930s Bucharest, some of the country’s most brilliant young intellectuals converged to form the Criterion Association. Bound by friendship and the dream of a new, modern Romania, their members included historian Mircea Eliade, critic Petru Comarnescu, Jewish playwright Mihail Sebastian and a host of other philosophers and artists. Together, they built a vibrant cultural scene that flourished for a few short years, before fascism and scandal splintered their ranks. Cristina A. Bejan asks how the far-right Iron Guard came to eclipse the appeal of liberalism for so many of Romania’s intellectual elite, drawing on diaries, memoirs and other writings to examine the collision of culture and extremism in the interwar years. The first English-language study of Criterion and the most thorough to date in any language, this book grapples with the complexities of Romanian intellectual life in the moments before collapse.”
Both the Kindle and hardcover versions of the book are available on Amazon.
Cristina A. Bejan is a Fulbright and Rhodes Scholar. She has had fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Wilson Center and Georgetown University. She received her Masters and DPhil in Modern History from the University of Oxford and her BA in Philosophy (Honors) from Northwestern University, where she also studied theatre.