Andrei Cușco
Role within the project
In the framework of the MIRO project, Andrei Cușco’s research will mainly focus on issues relating to Romanian intellectual migration toward the academic and cultural space of the Russian Empire. Another major topic will deal with the political emigration from the Russian Empire toward Romania and its main representatives, covering the period of the late 19th and early 20th century.
Dr. Andrei Cusco (b. 1982, Chișinău, Republic of Moldova) is a Researcher at the „A. D. Xenopol” Institute of History of the Romanian Academy in Iași, Romania. He holds an MA (2002) and a Ph.D. degree (2008) from the Department of History of the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. His research interests focus on modern East European history, comparative history of the Eurasian empires, intellectual history and historiography. For a number of years, he has been working on issues related to Bessarabia’s symbolic geography, the competing Russian and Romanian visions of this contested region in the second half of the 19th and early 20th century, Russian-Romanian relations during the same period, as well as on broader issues of Russian and Romanian intellectual history. During the academic year 2006-2007 he was a Fellow at the New Europe College in Bucharest. From September 2008, he was a Lecturer at the Department of History and Geography of the “Ion Creangă” State Pedagogical University in Chișinău. From September 2016 he is an Associate Professor at the same department. From December 2011 to September 2015, Dr. Cusco was Director of the Center for Empire Studies within the Faculty of History and Philosophy of the State University of Moldova in Chisinau. Between September 2015 and January 2016 Dr. Cusco was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Department of History, University of Maryland (College Park). Dr. Cusco’s first major publication is a book on the history of Bessarabia as a borderland of the Russian Empire (Bessarabia as a Part of the Russian Empire, 1812-1917), co-authored with Victor Taki and published at the Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie Press (Moscow) in 2012. He has also co-edited a volume on Romania and its neighbors during the early phase of World War I (Flavius Solomon, Andrei Cușco, Mihai-Ștefan Ceaușu, eds. România și statele vecine la începutul Primului Război Mondial: Viziuni, percepții, interpretări [Romania and the Neihghboring States in the Early Phase of World War I: Visions, Perceptions, Interpretations]. Iași: ”Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University Press, 2016). His second book – A Contested Borderland: Competing Russian and Romanian Visions of Bessarabia in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century – was published at the CEU Press in October 2017.
Project activities (research trips, conferences, publications) during 2018
MIRO Publications
Article: ”Scenariile alternative” ale identității basarabene la începutul secolului al XX-lea: mobilizare etnică, românitate incertă și construcție națională într-o provincie de frontieră [„Alternative Scenarios” of Bessarabian Identity in the Early 20th Century: Ethnic Mobilization, Uncertain Romanian-ness and Nation-Building in a Borderland Province], in: PLURAL. History, Culture, Society (Chișinău), Vol. 6, Nr. 1, 2018, pp. 43-62. Article partially funded by MIRO.
MIRO Activities
- Research trip, September 5 – October 26, 2018, Sofia, Bulgaria (The Bulgarian State Archives and the Bulgarian National Library in Sofia). The research activities focused on the southern dimension of the cultural interactions and migration processes originating from or being directed toward the Romanian cultural space.
- Cușco, Andrei: Public Lecture/ presentation. Topic: Nationalism, Societal Mobilization and State Violence in the Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire during World War I. 20. 06. 2018,”A. D. Xenopol” Institute of History of the Romanian Academy, Iași.
- Cușco, Andrei. ’National Indifference,’ Mobilization of Ethnicity, and Alternative Identity Projects in Early 20th-Century Bessarabia. Paper presented at the International Conference of the Society for Romanian Studies (SRS) #Romania 100: Looking Forward Through the Past, Academy of Economic Studies (ASE), Bucharest, 25-30. 06. 2018.
- Cușco, Andrei. Mobilization of Ethnicity, State Violence and Population Politics in the East European Borderlands during World War I. Paper presented at the International Conference World War I and Beyond: Human Tragedies, Social Challenges, Scientific and Cultural Responses, Humboldt Foundation Romania, Bucharest, 17-19.09. 2018.
Other significant publications (outside MIRO)
Andrei Cușco, ”Nationalism and War in a Contested Borderland: The Case of Russian Bessarabia (1914-1917)”, in: Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz, Alexander Semyonov, and Mark von Hagen, eds. The Empire and Nationalism at War (Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers, 2014), pp. 137-162 (abstract).
