Contributors
Ionuț Biliuță works as a researcher at the “Gh. Sincai Institute” (Tg. Mures, Romania) afilliated with the Romanian Academy. His main academic interests are the history of the Orthodox Church in the 20th century, with a special emphasis on the Romanian and Greek Orthodox Churches, antisemitism and racism in modern Orthodox theology, fascism and Orthodox clergymen, transferability of various languages of knowledge between Western and Eastern Europe, ecumenism, atheism and unbelief in Eastern Europe, and underground religious groups during the 20th century. His latest publication is “Fascism, Race, and Orthodoxy in Interwar Transylvania: Fr. Liviu Stan (1910-1973) and the ‘Stăniloae generation’,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 89, Issue 1 (2020): 101-124.
Iuliana Cindrea is a PhD student on the European Research Council Project, Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: Hidden Galleries in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe (Hidden Galleries). Her main research interests include the history of religious minorities in Romania, especially Old Calendarists, Tudorists, and Neo-protestant communities, and the manner in which they were perceived by totalitarian regimes in the 20th century Romania.
Roland Clark is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. His research interests include lived religion, Eastern Orthodoxy, theology, nationalism, fascism, gender, and the Holocaust. He is the author of Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015) and Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania: The Limits of Orthodoxy and Nation-Building (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), as well as 35 book chapters and journal articles.
Ágnes Hesz is assistant professor at the Department of European Ethnology – Cultural Anthropology, University of Pécs, and worked as postdoctoral researcher on the Hidden Galleries ERC project in 2018. She is the author of Élők, holtak és adósságok. A halottak szerepe egy erdélyi faluközösségben (The Dead, the Living, and their Debts. The Role of the Dead in a Village Community, Balassi: Budapest, 2012)
James Kapaló is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religions at University College Cork, Ireland and Principal Investigator of the Hidden Galleries ERC project. His research interests include religious minority identities and politics, anti-religious policies and propaganda and folk religion in Eastern Europe. He is author of Text, Context and Performance: Gagauz Folk Religion in Discourse and Practice (Leiden: Brill, 2011), Inochentism and Orthodox Christianity: Religious Dissent in the Russian and Romanian Borderlands (Routledge: London, 2019) and co-editor with Tatiana Vagramenko of Hidden Galleries: Material Religion in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe (Lit Verlag, 2020).
Dumitru Lisnic holds a PhD in Contemporary History from “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, Romania. His thesis focused on elite recruitment, identity and informal networks among local nomenklatura of Soviet Moldavia during late Stalinism. He has participated in research projects focused on subjects such as collectivisation of agriculture under Communism and Romanian POWs detained in NKVD camps. Currently he is a PhD candidate at the Department of the Study of Religions, University College Cork, Ireland. His PhD project, which is based on data from the recently opened archives from Moldova and Ukraine, explores anti-sectarian policies, antireligious propaganda and the dynamics of the religious field in the Moldavian ASSR.
Iemima Ploscariu is a PhD student at Dublin City University with a project entitled "Religious Entanglements: Romanian, Roma, and Jewish Neo-protestants in Interwar Romania," funded by the Irish Research Council. She has previous publications on ethnic and religious minorities in such journals as Nationalities Papers, Journal of Religion in Europe, and East European Jewish Affairs.
Kinga Povedák is a research fellow at MTA-SZTE (Hungarian Academy of Sciences – University of Szeged) ’Convivence’ Religious Pluralism Research Group. She worked as postdoctoral research on the Hidden Galleries ERC Project from 2016 to 2018. She is the author of the book Gitáros Apostolok – A keresztény könnyűzene vallástudományi elemzése, 2019 (Guitarist Apostles – The analysis of Christian popular music).
Anca Șincan is a researcher at the “Gheorghe Șincai” Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities of the Romanian Academy in Tîrgu-Mureș. She was a postdoctoral researcher on the European Research Council Project Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: Hidden Galleries in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe (Hidden Galleries) from 2017-19. Her research interests revolve around the recent history of East Central Europe, history of historical writing, memory and remembrance, church history, religion and politics on which she has 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.
Tatiana Vagramenko has a PhD in anthropology from National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She served as a postdoctoral researcher at University College Cork, Ireland and as a George F. Kennan Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC. Her project, Religious Minorities in Ukraine from the Soviet Underground to the Euromaidan: Pathways to Religious Freedom and Pluralism in Enlarging Europe, funded by the Irish Research Council, explores historical materials from recently opened KGB archives in Ukraine and the ethnography of the Euromaidan Revolution.
Maciej Krzywosz is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Sociology at the University of Bialystok, Poland and was Head of the Reserch and Documentation Laboratory of Miraculous Phenomena, Institute of Sociology University of Bialystok from 2008-19. His research interests focus on miraculous phenomena in a sociological context. He is the author of Cuda w Polsce Ludowej. Studium przypadku prywatnego objawienia maryjnego w Zabłudowie [Miracles in the Polish People’s Republic. Case study of the Private Marian Apparition in Zabłudów] (2016). He received a grant from the National Science Centre, Cracow, Poland (2018) and a bilateral state scholarship from Tempus Közalapítvány, Budapest, Hungary (2021). His latest publication is “From orality to the Internet: transformations of religious communication in Polish miracular communities” in: Metamorphoses of Religion and Spirituality in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. S. H. Zaręba, M. Sroczyńska, R. Cipriani, M. Choczyński, W. Klimski, published by Routledge 2022.