BrainMap

Oana-Valentina Sorescu-Iudean

Dr. Phil

- UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI

Researcher

Expertise & keywords

Raising the Nation: Institutional and Grassroots Initiatives for Orphan Welfare in Transylvania during Dualism Call name: P 1 - SP 1.1 - Proiecte de cercetare pentru stimularea tinerelor echipe independente
PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2019-0472 2020 - 2022

Role in this project:

Coordinating institution: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI

Project partners: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI (RO)

Affiliation: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI (RO)

Project website: http://nation-building-transylvania.ro/

Abstract:

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the concurrent nation-building efforts of the nationalities inhabiting the Dual Monarchy transgressed the boundaries of cultural and political activism and insinuated themselves into the sphere of the family. Not only was the nation a priority, hence the efforts to build it politically, economically, and socially, but it was also the sum of its individuals: who more in need of aid to grow into good Romanians, Transylvanian Saxons, or Hungarians, than orphans? Private scholarship foundations, confessional or cultural associations, women’s reunions, or even informal groups, loosely organized around certain leading figures or national gazettes, joined in their efforts to literally and figuratively raise the nation. Children in general, and orphans in particular, would come into focus as the perfect locus of intervention and the nexus of future national revival. Starting from these premises, the present project aims to a. unravel the complex legislative and institutional underpinnings of the orphan welfare system developed in Dualist Hungary, focusing on the counties of historical Transylvania (i.e. without the Banat and Partium) during Dualism and prior to the First World War; b. reconstitute the historical experience of orphans, regardless of their social-economic, national, or confessional backgrounds, as subjects in their own narratives, possessed of agency; c. integrate the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of orphan welfare in Transylvania, by adapting and making use of already extant digital infrastructures of social and population history (the Probate Database of Transylvania, the Historical Population Database of Transylvania, and the Historical Data Grinder). Given the project’s inclusive approach, the recovery of Transylvanian orphans’ fates will serve as a high point from which new vistas of trans-national and trans-confessional social history of modern Transylvania can reveal themselves.

Romanian Officers in the Habsburg Army and their Involvement in Civil Society (late 18th century to 1918) Call name: P 1 - SP 1.1 - Proiecte de cercetare pentru stimularea tinerelor echipe independente
PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0432 2018 - 2020

Role in this project:

Coordinating institution: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI

Project partners: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI (RO)

Affiliation: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI (RO)

Project website: http://istoriagranitei.ro/wp/proiecte/rohacs/

Abstract:

Our project aims to study the involvement of the Romanian officers (active, retired or reserve) and their wives in the establishment and activity of the civil society in the Habsburg Empire. Although the association might seem unusual, given the military restrictions and the officers’ ethos – characterized by a deeply ingrained imperial loyalism, being on active duty was not as incompatible as might have appeared with supporting civic initiatives. Furthermore, among reserve and retired officers, and among officers’ wives such incompatibility was almost absent. The officers’ engagement with civil society institutions and activities underlines, depending on the circumstances, either a civic/patriotic manifestation of imperial loyalism, or the attachment to a national (maybe even political) ideal. This involvement gradually intensified after 1867, partly as an effect of the structural changes within the officers’ corps (a higher share of those with bourgeois origin and civil higher education background), partly as a result of the institutional flourishing of the civil society. Besides, the officers seem to have represented, in this field too, a trans-ethnic binder for the Empire, given that their civic/patriotic initiatives and involvement sometimes surpassed the boundaries of national associative entities. Behind such acts one can also glimpse at the social networks that often seem to spur and support their engagement, be it purely civic/patriotic or wearing a nationalist coat. As neither the history of the civil society from Transylvania and Hungary, nor that of the Romanian k.u.k. officers’ corps have been systematically studied, the overlapping of these two research areas has the potential to bring up significant knowledge, to propose new concepts and methodological approaches within Romanian historical research, and to link the latter with the New Military History of the Habsburg territories.

Social and professional trajectories in concurrent confessional spaces: Transylvania (1850 – 1918) Call name: P 4 - Proiecte de Cercetare Exploratorie
PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2016-0661 2017 - 2019

Role in this project:

Coordinating institution: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI

Project partners: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI (RO)

Affiliation: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI (RO)

Project website: http://www.elite-research.eu/Socio-professional%20trajectories.html

Abstract:

Throughout modernity, the parish priests gradually assumed the role of intercessor between communities (parishes), ecclesiastical institutions, and state local and central level administration. In ethnically and confessionally heterogeneous regions, such as Transylvania, the parish priests not only shepherded their communities in a spiritual sense, but also took on the mantle of de-facto guides in the entangled web of nationalist movements and political affirmation. In the case of the Orthodox and Greek-Catholic denominations, dominant from a quantitative perspective during the 19th and 20th centuries, but whose adherents were politically-marginalized and wielded few mechanisms of influencing state policy, the middle clergy saw itself placed between the often competing interests and necessities of their respective churches, their (sometimes ethnically-mixed) communities, and the succeeding configurations of state power in Transylvania. The ways in which they responded to the challenges posed by these ambivalent settings should be regarded as function of their upbringing, family and social-economic background, education, and individual or group strategies.

The present project therefore aims to illuminate these characteristics, by conducting a systematic quantitative analysis of the middle clergy from the Orthodox archdiocese of Sibiu and the Greek-Catholic archdiocese of Blaj, between 1850 and 1918. By creating an-initially prosopographic database of middle clergy from these two dioceses and augmenting it with information regarding social-economic background, the kinship ties, social mobility and career trajectories, the project will examine to how the clergy’s characteristics, composition, and strategies enabled them to fare in these constantly-changing environments. By covering this wide gap in current Southeast European scholarship, the project will create a model for analysis that can be applied in other regions, or for other social-professional groups.

Rhythms and Patterns: The Quantitative Dimension of Family Life in Transylvania, 1850-1918 Call name: Projects for Young Research Teams - RUTE -2014 call
PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-2208 2015 - 2017

Role in this project:

Coordinating institution: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI

Project partners: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI (RO)

Affiliation: UNIVERSITATEA BABES BOLYAI (RO)

Project website: http://csp.centre.ubbcluj.ro/Rypat/

Abstract:

The main goal of the project is the longitudinal analyse of the main demographical events which can be found in the parish register from Transylvania between 1850-1910. The new scientific requirements of the past couple of decades have imposed a change of perspective in the study of populations, shifting interest from the study of demographic regimes, of data aggregated strictly for longitudinal analysis, to research on the life course of people, based on micro-social level data. Life course refers to the route followed by individuals throughout their existence, to the events through which they pass: births, marriages, divorces, deaths, changes of occupation, migration. Demographic historians are showing an increased interest in this approach, focusing specifically on research methods based on micro-level data. Family reconstitution used to be considered the main traditional analytical tool for this purpose (Boonstra and Panhuysen 1988), but this stage has been overcome, and analytical tools have been developed so as to benefit from the entire wealth of information on the lives of individuals that is available to historians, marking the transition, in other words, to event history analysis. This entails, however, new requirements and demands as regards the manner of organizing the available data. Our data is HPDT, the historical population database of Transylvania, under development at Centre for population Studies.

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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