Claudiu Oancea is a PhD candidate at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and a visiting student at CREES. During the spring term of 2011, he was a visiting student at UC Berkeley. His main research interests are history of communist regimes, popular culture, memory studies, oral history, and post 1989 national historiographies in Eastern Europe.

His PhD research focuses on the structure and functions of political festivals in socialist Romania (1948-1989), particularly on the role played by these festivals in cultural politics implemented by the Romanian communist regime and in the latter’s shifts from Marxism-Leninism to nationalism. Furthermore, it aims at construing their role in shaping a new type of culture for members of the working-class and peasantry: a culture striving to be both official and grass-rooted, but neither elitist, nor low culture.

Such festivals had existed since the interwar period, being disseminated through an increasing network of houses of culture, but their importance grew significantly under the communist regime. By 1976, the National Festival of Socialist Culture “Song to Romania” had been created, a festival of all festivals, encompassing all cultural and artistic activities within the country.

His project relies on local and central archives from Romania, as well as from Hungary and the USA, on collections of newspapers and magazines from the above mentioned period, as well as on oral history interviews and personal collections of photographs and written documents.