HISTORY:
1972-1975
The Romanian Studies Association of America (RSAA) began as a seminar on Romanian language and literature at the Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) held in New York in 1972. The next year, in Chicago, the By-Laws of the Romanian Studies Association of America were approved and the organization became an affiliate organization of the MLA. Its main purpose is to promote scholarship and creative work pertinent to Romanian Studies on the American continent, particularly in the United States and Canada, as well as to encourage Romanian Studies research in comparative contexts of European and Global Studies.
Each year since its inception as an international and interdisciplinary organization, RSAA has organized two sessions at the annual MLA convention. Since 1975, the Romanian Studies Forum (Formerly Romanian Studies Discussion Group), an organization affiliated with MLA, also organizes one MLA session annually, collaborating closely with the RSAA.
1975-2014
The RSAA has approximately 70 members (active, honorary, and life members). The RSAA membership is open to any MLA member in good standing interested in Romanian Studies. In addition, newly approved RSAA Membership regulations allow free membership for international scholars and graduate students as indicated in our new Membership page.
2014-present
The Romanian Studies Association of America’s Newsletter, a publication that functioned since the beginning of the association will turn this academic year (2016/2017) into the Journal of Romanian Studies Association of America, a scholarly publication that will further both the mission of the RSAA and the collaborative efforts to present new and complex academic works pertinent to Romanian Studies in current times.
In the last years, the Romanian Studies Association of America has also become affiliated to other organizations and institutions, with the Society for Romanian Studies since 2014, and with the University of Bucharest since 2015, participating to international conferences and scholarly exchanges. In the coming years, RSAA will continue to expand affiliation with other institutions and organizations in order to create multiple venues of academic studies on East-Central Europe and the West, to promote academic research and collaboration on all aspects of Romanian culture and civilization as well as invite new and culturally exciting research and creative work in international contexts.
ACTIVITY:
MLA Panels
MLA Sessions in Romanian Studies
2022
Multilingual Roots, Multilingual Identities: Romanian Language Justice in North America Affect and Multilingualism in the United States
Acculturation or Transnationalism? Two Faces of the Same Multilinguistic Experience
2021
Romanian Roots in North American Soil – Included in the Presidential Theme – The Art of Persistent Healing: Post-communist Medical Humanities
2020
Taking Stock: Romanian Culture, 1989–2019
Humanizing the (Post)Communist Paradigm: An Approach to the Rhetoric of Communism and Postcommunism in Its Own Theoretical Language
2019
Three Decades of Free Speech: Directions, False Starts, Intercultural Dialogue
2018
Aesthetics of Romanian Cinema, Literature, and Translation: Current Issues
Herta Muller and the Romanian Language, Culture, and Politics
2017
Refugees, Exiles, and Migration: Past and Present Journeys
Teaching Central and Eastern Europe and Its Communist Past
2016
Romanian Spirituality and the Global Challenge
Mothers without Frontiers: Inscriptions of Affective Maps in Contemporary Romania and the World
2015
Transnational Representations of Gender in Recent East European Literature and Film
Postcolonial Shadows on Postsocialist Skies
Negotiating Memory: Contemporary Romanian Culture in Translation
Catalan Literature in Translation and European Integration
2014
2013
Looking Out, Looking In: New Directions in Romanian Cinema Becoming Women: Gender Identities and Tensions in Romanian and World Literature
2012
Romania’s Intellectuals and Ceauşescu’s Secret Police
Performing Postmodernity with a Balkan Flair
2011
Narratives of Departure and Return in Eastern Europe
Subversiveness and the Carnivalesque in Romanian and European Theater
Herta Müller: East-West Perspectives
Rethinking Feminisms in Eastern Europe
2009
Heritage and Trauma Tourism
Romanian and Eastern European Literatures and the Arts (Music, Painting, Architecture, Photography, and Film)
Romanian Revolution of 1989: Public Discourse Twenty Years After
2008
The Internet Dialogue between Eastern Europe and the United States Romania in the Cold War Culture Romanian Representations and Self-Representations in Film, Literature, and the Media
2007
Visions of Europe in Romanian Literature
New Romanian Cinema
Writing across Borders: Twentieth-Century Romanian Writers Abroad
2006
Living at the Outskirts: Cinema and East European Countries
West Goes East: (Re)Turning to East Central Europe after 1989—A Discussion
Mircea Cartarescu at Home in the World: Comparative Approaches to His Work
2005
Coming to Terms with the Holocaust in Romania
Eastern European Women as Cultural Mediators
Gypsies in European Literature, Culture, and the Arts
2004
Eastern European Women as Creators of Humor: Culture, Literature, Film Constructing Postcommunist Eastern Europe: New Faces of the Imaginary Paris as Promised Land: Francophilia in Eastern Europe
2003
The Politics of Fiction in Pre/Post Communist Europe
Loss and Gain: The 20th-Century East European Experience in Exile -a round table discussion
Eugène Ionesco–Between Cultures and Literatures: A Quest of Identity
2002
(De)vampirizing Culture: The Dracula Myth – roundtable discussion
Representations of Eastern European Women in Western Culture – roundtable discussion
Romanian-French Cultural Relations
2001
Modern Romanian Short Fiction in a Comparative Context
The Hapsburg Myth in East Central European Literature and Film
The Disenchanted Lyric Muse: Romania and Its Neighbors
2000
Romanian and East European Drama: Connections and Contexts
Symptoms of Theory: Nation, Enjoyment, Critique
Minorities’ Literature and Politics in Romania
1999
Eastern Fantasies: Memoir, Romance, and Transactions of Identity in Mircea Eliade’s and Maitreyi Devi’s Fiction
Feminine Figures in Romanian and Balkan Modern Literature
It’s Ending, It’s Not: Malaise à Roumaine à la Fin du Siècle
Open Meeting on Central and East European Literatures Arranged by the Discussion
Groups on Hungarian Literature, Slavic Literatures and Cultures, and Romanian Studies