Anca is a historian of modern Central and Eastern Europe with focus on foreign aid, migration, and human rights. Within the Unlikely Refuge? project Anca will investigate concepts regarding “spaces of refugeedom” in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on refugee camps in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, during the First World War. By linking state-wide decision-making and local evidence, she will explore formal policies and effects in the creation of modern refugee camps in Austria-Hungary. Further, she is interested in refugees’ everyday lives in these spaces, as well as responses and attitudes of “host communities.” Beyond this subproject, Anca will contribute to a broader analysis of national and international humanitarian efforts on behalf of refugees in the Central and Eastern European space.
Anca holds a PhD (2018) in International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. She was a 2019-2020 Max Weber Fellow in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute. Previously, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (2018-2019), University of Oxford (2017-2018), and the Graduate Center, City University of New York (2015-2016). At the moment, Anca is also developing her first monograph, preliminarily titled “In Quest of an Ideal: Foreign Aid and State Reconstruction in Interwar Romania.”
She fully joined the UnRef starting with September 2020.
Contact: cretu@mua.cas.cz