Professor Bogdan Murgescu

Professor Bogdan Murgescu, Ph.D. is part of the academic staff of the Faculty of History and vice-rector of the University of Bucharest, in charge with budget and human resources.

Having a Bachelor’s degree in history-philosophy (1986) and a Ph.D. in history (1995), he has received the Roman Herzog grant from the “Alexander von Humboldt” Foundation at the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany (1998-2000) and he was visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh (2002) as well as at the Central European University in Budapest (2004). He has organised the historical research contest entitled MY HISTORY – EUSTORY (6 editions, 2000-2010) and he has been a member of the Executive Committee of the EUSTORY network (2001-2008 and 2009-2013). Occupying this position, he has received in 2007 the National German Award awarded to this network. After serving two four-year terms as president of the Romanian Historical Sciences Society, since 2019 he is its honorary president. From 2013 to 2020, as Director of the Council for University Doctoral Studies, he has coordinated all doctoral schools of the University of Bucharest. He has served in various academic boards and committees, and was elected in 2020 member of Academia Europaea.

His research interests include economic and social history, especially long-term development and the history of natural resources, the history of higher education and its role in the accumulation of human capital, the methodology of historical science, the history of communist regimes and of the post-communist transition. He has published up to now five authored books and an impressive number of studies in academic journals and collective volumes, both locally and abroad. For the volume on the monetary circulation in the Romanian Principalities during the 16th century (1996) he received the “Nicolae Iorga” award of the Romanian Academy. His most renowned work, for which he received several awards, is Romania and Europe. The Accumulation of Economic Disparities (1500-2010) (Iaşi, Polirom Publishing House, 2010).

He was also active in the management of higher education at national level. As vice-president of the National Council for the Financing of Higher Education (2011-2015) he has initiated and coordinated the publication of public annual reports regarding the financing of higher education for the years 2012, 2013 and 2014. During 2015-2016 he served as councillor on higher education of the Minister of National Education and Scientific Research, and in 2016-2021 he was president of the National Council of Statistics and Prognosis of Higher Education.