Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires
January 12, 2026 | 2:00PM - 4:00PM
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In-person
Location | Seminar Room 108N, North House, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto ON
The Centre for European and Eurasian Studies of the Munk School invites you to a talk by Anca Parvulescu (Washington University in St. Louis) and Manuela Boatcă (University of Freiburg) on their book, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022).
Already of significant cross-disciplinary influence, the book offers innovative decolonial perspectives aiming to creolize modernity and the modern world-system. It has received the Barrington Moore Award (Best Book in Comparative & Historical Sociology, ASA) and the René Wellek Prize (Best Book in Comparative Literature, ACLA).
How are modernity, coloniality, and interimperiality entangled? Bridging the humanities and social sciences, Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă provide innovative decolonial perspectives that aim to creolize modernity and the modern world-system. Historical Transylvania—at the intersection of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Russia—offers the platform for their multi-level reading of Liviu Rebreanu's 1920 novel Ion. Topics range from the region's capitalist integration to antisemitism and the enslavement of Roma, multilingualism, gender relations, and religion.
Anca Parvulescu is the Liselotte Dieckmann Professor in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research fields include international modernism, affect theory, Eastern Europe, and the history of comparatism. She is the author of Laughter: Notes on a Passion (MIT Press), The Traffic in Women’s Work (Chicago), and Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism (Cambridge).
Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg. Her research spans world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She is the author of Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism (Routledge).