Associate Professor
Claudiu TURCUȘ, PhD
claudiu.turcus@ubbcluj.ro
habilitation: 4309 / 08.08.2018
doctoral students in internship: 5
Academic profiles:
Google Scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wO-oTScAAAAJ&hl=ro
ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5935-0687
Claudiu Turcuş is an associate professor at the Faculty of Theatre and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University. His areas of interest include the East-Central European novel and cinema, post-communist narrative imagology, and critical theory. His volume of literary criticism and intellectual history, “Estetica lui Norman Manea” (Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 2012), was awarded the “Marian Papahagi” prize by the Writers’ Union of Romania and represents the first monograph dedicated to this important post-war Romanian writer, who has been nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize. The English version of the book, “Norman Manea: Aesthetics as East Ethics,” was published in 2016 by Peter Lang Academic Publishing. In 2017, he published the volume “Against Memory: From Socialist Aesthetics to the New Romanian Cinema” (Bucharest: Eikon), for which he was awarded the Observator cultural prize in the Essay category.
Research topics and recommended reading for admission
Research topics
1. Critical theory: ideologies and aesthetics of socio-cultural polarization
Research that applies critical theory to find relations between aesthetics and social structures: capitalism, postsocialism, neoliberalism, naționalism, populism, cultural conservativism, anticomunism, europeanisation, (semi)periphery. How moving image and other cultural products become the source of public conflict. Topics such as gender, family, sexuality, migration, religion, nation, education, “political corectness”, anti-elitism or anti-europenism. Projects that seek the interaction of theory with artistic or historical material are encouraged.
2. The political economy of the field of cultural production
Projects that look at ways the field of cultural production is shaped by financing, institutions, festivals, platforms, public policy, professional precarity, grants, co-productions, distribution, educational infrastructure and power relations in the creative industries. Romanian post-1989 cinema, documentary film, cultural journalism, editorial industries, digital platforms or the economy of festivals are all possible topics to work on.
3. Romanian and Central-East-European Cinema: memory, transition, capitalism
Research on the representations of socialism, transition and capitalism in Romanian and East-European Cinema. Relevant topics of research are labor, migration, entrepreneurship, social class, corruption, family, urbanization, precarity, symbolic violence, de-industrialization, socialist nostalgia and the new imaginaries of success.
4. Intermediate and hybrid cinema formats.
Research projects on the limits between cinema, literature, theatre, journalism, archive, video-essay, instalation, performance, podcast, social media and interactive documentary. Emphasis can be put on cultural revival processes: how a topic, an image, a trauma, a social cause or a political event migrates from the press to cinema, from literature to documentary, from archive to visual art or from social media to cinema.
Recommended reading
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Bolin, Göran. Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
Bolter, Jay David; Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Couldry, Nick; Mejias, Ulises A. The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Elleström, Lars, ed. Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Imre, Anikó, ed. A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas. Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Jenkins, Henry; Ford, Sam; Green, Joshua. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2013.
Parvulescu, Constantin; Turcuș, Claudiu. „Specters of Europe and Anti-communist Visual Rhetoric in Romanian Film of the Early 1990s.” În Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu și Katarzyna Marciniak, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures. Oxford University Press,
2020.
Parvulescu, Constantin; Turcuș, Claudiu. Romanian Capitalism on Film: Microhistories of Hope, Anxiety and Adaptation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025.
Renov, Michael. The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.