Ioana Macrea-Toma

She joined the Archives in 2012. Her research focuses on the formation of knowledge from the perspective of archival and media theories, the history of science, philosophy of history, and intellectual history. She teaches courses and seminars on theoretical and methodological questions in historiography, both in general and in relation to the history of the Cold War. Alongside her teaching, she has curated exhibitions—most notably Bibliotheca: The Future of the Library—and organized archival seminars and film screenings.

An interdisciplinary scholar trained in philology, comparative literature, and history, her scholarly trajectory reflects a search for interpretive paradigms beyond the formalist and context-free approaches that have often characterized regional literary studies. In her dissertation on the literary field in Romania under Communism, she argued for understanding political and literary choices as shaped by professional ethos, transnational interactions, and position-taking within a structured field of discursive possibilities.

She is currently expanding this line of inquiry into a book project examining Cold War epistemologies through the interplay of mutually observing cognitive systems: Radio Free Europe, the secret police, intellectuals within the literary field, and radio listeners. The project analyzes how perceptions of the “Other” were produced through feedback loops, surveillance practices, and mediated communication.

At the Archivum, she seeks to embed her research on Cold War knowledge systems within ongoing archival activities and to contribute to the development of an Archival Laboratory. She approaches research, curatorial work, and teaching as complementary components of a broader intellectual and institutional project: mapping history through the cognitive lenses of the archive. She actively participates in archival initiatives while critically reflecting on their epistemic assumptions.

Her work traces genealogies of information-gathering practices from the early 1950s to the digital present. An interest in the relationship between form, method, and content of knowledge leads her to engage with artistic research and art history. She integrates film screenings and exhibitions into seminar design, treating them both as objects of cultural history and as heuristic tools for methodological reflection. In this way, her earlier research on cultural fields converges with her current focus on theories of knowledge.

Since 2020, she has served as Academic Coordinator of the Visegrad Fellowship Program. She designed and directed the CEU Summer University program Confronting the Crisis of Expertise: Historical Roots and Current Challenges (2021), as well as the summer school Cybernetic Models in Economy – An Eastern European Perspective (2019, with Tincuta Heinzel). She also developed the Archivum research program Methodologies of Working in Cold War Archives and co-directed, with Istvan Rév, the Archivum’s archival internship for the History in the Public Sphere MA program (2022 and 2023 editions).