Cluj Centre of Irish Studies

Centre of Irish Studies

EFACIS Members:

Carmen BORBÉLY is Associate Professor of English at the Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, where she teaches eighteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. She is also Director of the Irish Studies MA programme in Cluj, where she runs courses on Irish Gothic Writing. She has published studies on the novels of Maria Edgeworth, Edna O’Brien, Seamus Deane, Patrick McCabe, Sara Baume, and Caitriona Lally, and is the author of Mapping the (Post)Gothic. Essays on Irish Contemporary Fiction and Film (2014) and Genealogies of Monstrosity: Constructions of Monstrous Corporeality in Contemporary British Fiction (2015). She has conducted research at John F. Kennedy Institute Berlin, Notre Dame University and, as a Chevening Scholar, at the University of Oxford. She serves as executive editor of Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia and is an editor of Caietele Echinox. She is affiliated with the Centre for the Study of the Modern Anglophone Novel (CSMAN), the Centre for European Modernism Studies (CEMS), and the Phantasma Centre for Imagination Research (Cluj).

Alex CIOROGAR has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and is a Lecturer with the English Department (Babeș-Bolyai University, Faculty of Letters in Cluj-Napoca, Romania). He is the current director of Echinox magazine and the owner of OMG, an independent publishing house based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He is a member and the regional liaison for SHARP Romania and an editorial board member for Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai, Philologia. He won the Fernandes Fellowship (IAS Warwick University, English and Comparative Literary Studies, UK), the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Grant (Paris, France) and a COST Scholarship (Wurzburg, Germany). His current research interests include: authorship studies, British and Irish Romanticism, and contemporary literary theory.

Erika MIHÁLYCSA is Associate Professor at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania, where she teaches 20th-century and contemporary British and Irish literature. She has mainly published in the field of Joyce and Beckett studies, various aspects of European literary and visual modernism, and translation studies. Her articles and reviews have come out in Word and Image, Joyce Studies Annual, European Joyce Studies, Textual Practice, James Joyce Quarterly, Joyce Studies in Italy, HJEAS and in numerous edited volumes. She co-edited with Jolanta Wawrzycka the volume Retranslating Joyce for the 21st Century (European Joyce Studies 30, Brill 2020) and published the volume "A wretchedness to defend": Reading Beckett's Letters (HJEAS Books, 2022). She acted as editor of Rareș Moldovan's new, annotated Romanian translation of Ulysses (Polirom, 2023) and herself translates between Hungarian and English, having translated Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, fiction by Beckett, Patrick McCabe, or Brian Friel's Translations among others into Hungarian, and a handful of modernist and contemporary Hungarian authors into English. She acts as editor of European Joyce Studies and together with Rainer J. Han she edits the biannual online literary and arts journal HYPERION: On the Future of Aesthetics, issued by Contra Mundum Press (New York).

Rareș MOLDOVAN is Associate Professor of English at Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj. He teaches American literature, Irish film and a course on Samuel Beckett. His research interests include American contemporary fiction and poetry, film and adaptation studies, Irish literature (especially James Joyce and Samuel Beckett) and literary theory. He is the author of Symptomatologies: A Study of the Problem of Legitimation in Late Modernity (2011), and he has published articles and book chapters on American literature and film, literary theory, James Joyce. His translation of Joyce’s Ulysses into Romanian (co-edited with Erika Mihalycsa) has been published in March 2023, and his other translations include Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. He is the Editor-in-chief of the Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia and affiliated with the Centre for the Study of the Modern Anglophone Novel (CSMAN) at Babeș-Bolyai University.

Elena PĂCURAR PhD is Lecturer at the Department of Foreign Languages for Specific Purposes, Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania, where she teaches practical courses of English for Specific Purposes to undergraduate students and courses in Irish fiction to MA students. She has published a series of scientific articles on ESP and EFL teaching and learning, as well as on Irish modernism (specifically James Joyce's fiction). She is a member of the editorial board for the peer-reviewed academic journal Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia and of the Centre for the Study of the Modern Anglophone Novel.

Petronia PETRAR is a lecturer with the English Department of the Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Her research interests include twentieth century and contemporary fiction, the Scottish novel, and narrative ethics. She has published papers on the modernist, postmodernist and the contemporary novel, and she has edited several collections of essays, including a special issue of the journal American, British and Canadian Studies on “World and Nation: Tropes of Representation in Contemporary Scottish Writing.” She is the director of the Centre for the Study of the Modern Anglophone Novel, affiliated with her home university. She is the author of Spatial Representations in Contemporary British Fiction (2012), and, with Carmen-Veronica Borbély, of Our Heteromorphic Future: Encoding the Posthuman in Contemporary British Fiction (2014).

Liliana POP is an Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Cluj. She teaches in the Irish Studies MA programme, courses on Yeats and on Women Writers to 1st and 2nd-year students. She has published two books on English and Irish literature in English, with Romanian publishing houses, and has a third one in print with the French publishing house L’Harmattan. She has translated a novel by Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture, into Romanian. For the EFACIS online magazine she has translated a play and several poems by Yeats, texts of the John Banville programme, with her master students, as well as responses from Romanian writers to Banville’s texts. She has published articles and essays in several books and magazines in Romania, Spain, Germany and France.