Biography

Dana Mihailescu is Associate Professor of English/American Studies at the University of Bucharest. She earned her Ph.D. in Philology at the University of Bucharest in January 2010, with a dissertation entitled Ethical Dilemmas and Reconfigurations of Identity in Early Twentieth Century Eastern European Jewish American Narratives. She was a Fulbright Junior Visiting Researcher at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, in 2008-2009, and the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University in 2021-2022. From May to July 2025 she is The Professor Bernard Choseed Memorial Fellow and the Natalie and Mendel Racolin Memorial Fellow in East European Jewish Studies at the  Max Weinreich Research Center of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for project Emigration “on Foot” to North America as Cultural Resistance: Romania’s Jewish Fusgeyers from 1900 in History and Memory.

On the one hand, she has examined how memory and the ethics of remembrance function for the immigrant generations of Eastern European Jews coming to the U.S., particularly at the turn of the 20th century, as reflected in narratives of authors born in the Pale of Settlement (e.g. Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska) or Romania (Konrad Bercovici, M.E. Ravage, Maurice Samuel). On the other hand, she is interested in graphic narratives and Holocaust representation. She also explores how memories work for Holocaust child survivors, the 2nd and 3rd (plus) generations and for recent immigrants fleeing persecution, and how their complex paths influence fiction writing and history making. Among her recent projects are a published monograph, Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890-1930. Struggles for Recognition (Lexington Books/An Imprint of Rowman and Littlefield, 2018); an article on the early postwar representation of Jewish orphans returning from Transnistria to Romania at the end of World War II in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 2022; an article on the representation of Holocaust child survivors in the collective volume But I Live published in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly,  vol. 46, no. 3 (2023), pp. 573-599 and an article on humor as (graphic) resilience and revenge against Holocaust perpetrators in Rethinking History, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 558-587. She is currently writing a book about the fusgeyer movement.

You can also access my CV by clicking here: https://www.academia.edu/2197160/CV_dana_mihailescu

Further details about my research projects and the classes I teach (including syllabi and class schedule) can be accessed here: https://sites.google.com/view/dmihailes/home