BrainMap

Mrs. Ana-Maria Gruia

PhD

museographer - MUZEUL NATIONAL DE ISTORIE AL TRANSILVANIEI

Researcher | Scientific reviewer | Entrepreneur | Other

I am a sociologist and art historian with an interest in material culture, with research into specific groups of artifacts such as medieval stove tiles, early modern tobacco pipes, and modern and contemporary pharmaceutical goods. I analyze material culture with methods pertaining to iconography, social, religious, economic and cultural studies, museology, and entangled history. Since 2008 I am an expert in cultural goods certified by the Romanian Ministry of Culture and in 2022-2023 I have completed the accredited museum collection management course of the National Institute for Cultural Research and Training. I work as museum curator, have reorganized the Pharmacy Museum in Cluj have designed 13 temporary exhibitions, and have led two major research projects. I am also active as museum educator, co-editor of Acta Musei Napocensis II Historica, established translator, but also a visual artist and a reenactor.

Web of Science ResearcherID: https://publons.com/researcher/3634462/ana-maria-gruia/

Curriculum Vitae (15/07/2023)

Expertise & keywords

All Things Apothecary in 16th-20th-century Transylvania. The History of Pharmacy Collection in Cluj-Napoca Call name: P 4 - Proiecte de Cercetare Exploratorie, 2020
PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-1562 2021 - 2023

Role in this project: Project coordinator

Coordinating institution: MUZEUL NATIONAL DE ISTORIE AL TRANSILVANIEI

Project partners: MUZEUL NATIONAL DE ISTORIE AL TRANSILVANIEI (RO)

Affiliation: MUZEUL NATIONAL DE ISTORIE AL TRANSILVANIEI (RO)

Project website: https://pharmatrans.mnit.ro/

Abstract:

The project envisages the publication in English of a complete catalogue of the History of Pharmacy Collection in Cluj, part of the National Museum of Transylvanian History, the conservation and restoration of some of these patrimony goods, and the research of the history of pharmacy in Transylvania during the 18th century based on the previously unpublished sources in the collection (manuscripts, jars, tools, printed materials) analyzed through innovative methods such as complex chemical analyses of preserved pharmaceutical preparations (mass spectrometry, chromatography), as well as through the new data obtained through the ongoing restoration work of the oldest pharmacy in Cluj (the Hintz House that houses the collection). This will be the first exhaustive catalogue of the collection (6 volumes, ca. 2500 artifacts dated to the 16th-20th centuries), a valuable source for future studies, that will be made available online and will be sent to 150 libraries in Romania and abroad. The proposed research is deeply interdisciplinary, at the intersection of fields of study such as entangled and global history, history of technology, social and economic history, cultural and museum studies (in which the project leader and the team members have studies and experience).

The Vicious Gift. Pipes and the Habit of Smoking in Early Modern Transylvania Call name: Postdoctoral Research Projects - PD-2011 call
PN-II-RU-PD-2011-3-0015 2011 - 2013

Role in this project: Project coordinator

Coordinating institution: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI

Project partners: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI (RO)

Affiliation: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI (RO)

Project website: http://www.smokingintransylvania.ro

Abstract:

The project aims at analyzing how smoking was introduced and what it represented in sixteenth-seventeenth-century Transylvania. The transfer of the new practice and of related artifacts and goods (tobacco, pipes, accessories) from the Americas and Western Europe to Transylvania via the Turks makes the phenomenon a good subject for entangled history and transfer studies. Various sources will be employed, making the research highly interdisciplinary: written documents (inventories, correspondence, diaries and memoirs, traveling literature, prohibition laws, town statutes, sermons, polemic works), archaeological objects (pipes, tobacco boxes and pouches) visual sources (depictions of smokers on stove tiles, playing cards, engravings, metalwork etc.).

For Transylvania, the introduction and spread of this social and cultural habit is an adequate tool for the research of mechanism and mutual interactions of societies in contact, since a western Christian habit was passed on by the Ottoman Turks to the Hungarians and Saxons (at first) in the principality. The publication of written and visual sources related to smoking and pipes in Transylvania would integrate such materials in the specialized literature on the topic, making them available to specialists in the field, while the analysis would bring a significant contribution to the cultural, social, and economic knowledge on Early Modern Transylvania.

FILE DESCRIPTION	DOCUMENT
List of research grants as project coordinator	Download (23.5 kb) 05/05/2016
List of research grants as partner team leader
List of research grants as project coordinator or partner team leader
Significant R&D projects for enterprises, as project manager
R&D activities in enterprises
Peer-review activity for international programs/projects