Anca Sincan
Gheorghe Sincai Institute for Social Sciences and the Humanities, Targu Mures, Romania, Recent History, Faculty Member
Institute of History of Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Scientific (Research) Department, researcher in ERC project Negotiating Sovereignty: Challenges of Secularism and Nation Building in Central Eastern Europe Since 1780
Anca Șincan has a Ph.D. in history from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary with a research on religion in communist Romania. She completed her academic training at Padova University, Oxford University, the European History Institute in Mainz, and New Europe College in Bucharest. Her research interests revolve around recent history of East Central Europe, history of historical writing, memory and remembrance, church history, religion and politics on which she published articles and book chapters. She took part as an expert in the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania for the chapter Church/ religious denominations under communism. She taught courses at the History and International Relations Department at University of Medicine, Farmacy, Science and Technology in Tîrgu-Mureș. She lectured at the Political Science Department (Bucharest University) and was a guest lecturer at the Religious Studies Program and History Department at Central European University. She is a researcher at the “Gheorghe Șincai” Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities of the Romanian Academy in Tîrgu-Mureș. She was a researcher in the European Research Council Project Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: Hidden Galleries in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe (Hidden Galleries) at University College Cork (2017-2021). She had a junior fellowship at the Polish Institute for Advanced Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland (2019-2020). Currently she is a researcher in the ERC project "Negotiating Sovereignty: Challenges of Secularism and Nation Building in Central Eastern Europe Since 1780" at the Research Centre for Humanities, Hungary.
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Books by Anca Sincan
formation of intellectual elites during successive projects of
modernization during 19th and 20th centuries. While existing
works on the topic focus either on the elimination of previous
elites in times of radical social change or on the creation of new
elites by each new political regime, we focus on a third
mechanism: the recuperation/conversion of previous intellectual
elites for new modernization projects. This mechanism of
historical and social change appears at every major transition
(“historical disjuncture”) but is given less importance both in
history/social sciences and in public discourse.
Almost without exception, the successive visions of
modernity fail in their attempt to transform the deep social
strata in spite of their explicit goals in that regard. Nevertheless,
each one creates new, imperfect, and fragmentary ways of
intervening and programming the newly instituted populations,
individuals and fields of activity. New conceptual vocabularies
were brought forth – by imitation or explicit distancing – out of
the failed discourses and reforms and larger spaces for expert-led
intervention were opened for subsequent reforms and projects
of modernization.
Scrutinizing the moments of discontinuity in modern and
contemporary Romanian history, this book will argue that, far
from a complete break with a past, each modernization projects
builds on and has to incorporate pre-existing social
processes/resources.
Papers by Anca Sincan
formation of intellectual elites during successive projects of
modernization during 19th and 20th centuries. While existing
works on the topic focus either on the elimination of previous
elites in times of radical social change or on the creation of new
elites by each new political regime, we focus on a third
mechanism: the recuperation/conversion of previous intellectual
elites for new modernization projects. This mechanism of
historical and social change appears at every major transition
(“historical disjuncture”) but is given less importance both in
history/social sciences and in public discourse.
Almost without exception, the successive visions of
modernity fail in their attempt to transform the deep social
strata in spite of their explicit goals in that regard. Nevertheless,
each one creates new, imperfect, and fragmentary ways of
intervening and programming the newly instituted populations,
individuals and fields of activity. New conceptual vocabularies
were brought forth – by imitation or explicit distancing – out of
the failed discourses and reforms and larger spaces for expert-led
intervention were opened for subsequent reforms and projects
of modernization.
Scrutinizing the moments of discontinuity in modern and
contemporary Romanian history, this book will argue that, far
from a complete break with a past, each modernization projects
builds on and has to incorporate pre-existing social
processes/resources.
Secret police archives in former-communist countries are full of pictures, letters, religious brochures and images collected as evidence against religious communities. How do police files narrate the religious “enemy”? What do these files say about religious life in the USSR? In this interview with Anca Șincan, the Romanian Academy of Sciences, and Tatiana Vagramenko, University College Cork, we will discuss how the secret police archives represent underground religious life. What do they tell us? And what are their limitations