About

Emanuela Grama is an Associate Professor and Associate Head of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University's Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She specializes in the history of 20th century Central and Eastern Europe, with a focus on urban politics, processes of state-making, property, memory, and cultural change in Romania during the 20th and 21st centuries. She received her PhD from the Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2010. Her extensive archival and ethnographic research in Romania has informed her scholarly work, which includes publications on topics such as the politics of archaeology and nationalism under socialism, urban planning and material practices, petitions, intertextuality, citizenship in socialism, and plagiarism in post-socialism. Grama's first book, Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania, published by Indiana University Press in 2019, explores the transformation of Bucharest's Old Town from a diverse early 20th-century neighborhood into a socialist epitome of national history and later into a European capital's historic center. The book examines the dual nature of heritage and strategies of differentiation that can lead to marginalization. Her ongoing research includes a manuscript on property restitution, ethnic rights, and Europeanization in Transylvania, Romania.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Law
• Archaeology
• Art
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Economics
• Literature
• Regional science
• Economic history
• Political economy
• Development economics
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• The Empires within Us—Or Can We Really Talk about Postimperial Subjectivity?

  Slavic Review · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract It was about the dreams that I first thought of when reading Dace Dzenovska’s thought-provoking article. What are the residents of Lielciems dreaming about? Do they dream of empires? I wonder, if we view the former USSR as an empire, can we further disentangle the recent past of people of Lielciems as imperial actors from their overwhelmingly ahistorical present, where they seem to have been forgotten by almost everyone—or, at least, anyone who could offer them a new visibility and dignity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Conditional Restitution and Strategic Silences: The Shifting Political Value of Ethnic Germans in Communist Romania

  Palgrave studies in the history of experience · 2023 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Book Reviews

  Journal of Romanian Studies · 2022-10-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Brokers of Modernity: East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects, 1910–1950 by Martin Kohlrausch

  Ab imperio · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Brokers of Modernity: East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects, 1910–1950 by Martin Kohlrausch Emanuela Grama (bio) Martin Kohlrausch, Brokers of Modernity: East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects, 1910–1950 ( Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019). Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-94-6270-172-4. Visionaries and vanguards. Powerful, bold, and cosmopolitan. Always daring more and wanting more – not just from institutions, governments, and their colleagues but also from themselves. This is the collective portrait that the historian Martin Kohlrausch draws for many of the architects professionally coming of age in Western and Central Europe during and after World War I. Kohlrausch argues that these architects as a particular professional group were agents of modernity. That is, they were experts who, by virtue of their profession and their cosmopolitan training, promoted new ideas about a social and political order intrinsically tied to urban living. His main aim is to show that these ideas about a novel way of living, working, and interacting in a spatially redefined and redesigned urban space were cosmopolitan because their promoters were themselves cosmopolitan – less inclined to abide by and believe in allegedly national differences and ethnic divides. The book is organized in six chapters that trace different aspects [End Page 302] of the architects' transformation into "brokers of modernity." Kohlrausch focuses on particular figures in the movement, and especially the architects living in Poland after World War I. The political landscape of the Polish Second Republic was fraught with internecine fights among different political factions. The line between democracy and authoritarianism became increasingly blurry especially during the Sanation (Sanacja) period (1926–1935). This was a state that wanted to mobilize all social spheres in order to gain further legitimacy for its populist agenda, which included providing better living conditions for citizens. Kohlrausch tries to place Poland in the context of the broader social and political changes occurring in Central Europe in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, the book would have benefited from a clearer discussion of what "modernization" and "modernism" meant for various national governments in the region and for the experts these governments financially supported (as well as relied on). This clarification is particularly important because some of the pro-modernization agendas were deeply tied to nationalist ideologies and programs of nation-building that were profoundly xenophobic. To what extent then did such complex allegiances apply to the international collaboration among architects across national boundaries? The evidence of extensive international collaborations among Polish, Hungarian, French, and German architects does not necessarily mean that each of these professional groups, and even individuals, understood and promoted abstract modernist ideas in the same way. The book's arguments would have been more nuanced if the author had analyzed the choices made by some of these architects in the light of the tension between their national loyalties and their pursuits of international collaboration. This is especially important because such a tension appears to have informed the workings of CIAM-Ost, an organization to which many of these architects devoted their energy and enthusiasm. CIAM-Ost was the "Eastern" branch of the CIAM (Congrès internationaux d'architecture modern), the organization established in 1928 by an international group of architects to promote a radically new urbanity, in which urban planning was grounded in "science, technology, rationalization, and efficiency" (P. 27). This organization is a key focus of the book, and the author draws on a wealth of sources (from periodicals to correspondence) to discuss in detail the ideological and practical agendas of the organization's founders. In doing so, he reveals the intricate but also volatile collaboration among different architects [End Page 303] involved in this network, as well as in the broader CIAM. Special attention is paid to a power couple of two Polish Jewish architects, Symon and Helena Syrkus, who became the leaders of the modernist movement in interwar Poland. Symon Syrkus knew how to promote his vision of a democratic urbanity, meaning "functional cities formed by apartment buildings made with new and affordable materials (steel), placed in the midst of green areas" (P. 147). He also knew how to make powerful government officials listen...

  PublisherDOI

• Dark Finance: Illiquidity and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe by FabioMattioliStanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. 297 pp.

  American Anthropologist · 2021-06-21

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture. Bucharest, 1949–1964

  Europe Asia Studies · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  The architecture of early socialism in Romania in the 1950s and early 1960s reveals key political negotiations about the form and meaning of urban space. This book provides a cultural and historica...

  PublisherDOI

• A deconstruction story: Property, memory, and temporality in a Transylvanian village

  History and Anthropology · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  The paper explores how the reconstruction of a Baroque castle in Transylvania became an indirect strategy to speed up its restitution to the former owners. It also analyses the reactions that this reconstruction and the request for its restitution triggered among the inhabitants of the multi-ethnic village where the castle is located. The castle used to belong to a famous Hungarian aristocratic family but became nationalized as state property under the post-1945 communist regime. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, I argue that the debates around the legal status and cultural value of the Bánffy castle reveal how various actors, ranging from the NGO experts, the lawyers supporting the heir, the state institutions, the local authorities, and the villagers engaged with one another in a struggle about meaning and value that was carried out through a struggle over competing temporalities. All of these actors strategically carved up the past, seeking particular historical periods that would ground and justify their own (legal or symbolical) claims over the castle. In response to the calls of external actors to remember a history that did not exist, such as an idyllic narrative of mutual cooperation between the castle and the village before the communist period, the villagers strategically used the divide between communism and postcommunism. They did so to both justify their past actions, including their alleged participation in the castle’s ruination, as morally sound, and to reject foreign experts’ attempts to idealize the interwar period and deny any value to the communist times.

  PublisherDOI

• Restitution Reversal or “Re-nationalization”? An Analysis of Law, Property, and History Through the Case of the “Szekely Mikó” High School in Transylvania

  Journal of Romanian Studies · 2020-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In 2002, the Reformed Church in Transylvania requested the retrocession of the Reformed Szekely Miko high school in Sf. Gheorghe/Sepsiszentgyörgy, Covasna’s capital city. The state restitution commission at that time approved the return. In 2012, a court invalidated the initial restitution decision, accused the members of the former commission of fraud, and requested that the Church return the building to the city authorities. A close reading of the legal arguments that each party employed to justify or reject the restitution reveals competing temporalities of law and visions of history. This paper analyzes the long and tense debates around this case of property restitution-reversal, to further explore several interconnected phenomena: broader ideologies about the relationship of historical, ethnic, and property rights in contemporary Transylvania; the political mobilization of Romania’s ethnic Hungarians around property restitution; and the ways in which negotiations around property propelled more conservative elites to the leadership of Transylvanian Hungarians and enabled them to strengthen their ties with their kin-state, Hungary.

  PublisherDOI

• Socialist Heritage

  Indiana University Press eBooks · 2019-11-27 · 26 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania

  2019-12-01 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Svetlana Suveică

  University of Regensburg

  1 shared

• Iemima Ploscariu

  1 shared

• Cristina A. Bejan

  Metropolitan State University of Denver

  1 shared

• Laura Balomiri

  University of Vienna

  1 shared

Labs

• Emanuela Grama LabPI

Education

• PhD, Anthropology and History

  University of Michigan

  2010

Awards & honors

• 2020 Ed Hewett Book Prize offered by ASEEES