Wednesday, November 5th 2025, starting with 17.30 CET, the Iași International Festival of Literature and Translation (FILIT), in collaboration with ARTLIT (the Romanian Association for Literary Translators), will host an online CELA masterclass with Andreea Mironescu, senior researcher at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research within “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, Romania.
The CELA presentation Eastern and Western Europe: perspectives and priorities in cultural agendas is part of the Literature as a Social Elevator Masterclass series offered by FILIT&ARTLIT.
All the participants who signed up for this online meeting will join a presentation followed by a free dialogue with the guest speaker.
Four decades after the fall of communism and the subsequent integration of several East European countries in the EU, Eastern Europe is still often regarded as a different part of Europe. Several cultural clichés and stereotypes about the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ persist in contemporary discourse, especially in debates concerning social and collective memory, and resurface in disputes about migration, politics and the war in Ukraine. This masterclass asks how in this context the differences and similarities between cultural agendas can be used to fill these gaps and to support connections and dialogue between writers from Eastern and Western European countries. How can the writers and translators further explore these individual or collective experiences related to past events and the current social issues? Is the past still reverberating in the way in which writers are choosing their topics? And what literary forms are chosen to address difficult and challenging topics? The masterclass will explore several directions employed by literary actors to create connections and will propose a collaborative manner in which the East-West divisive lines can be addressed and bridged through writing and in the process of translation.
Andreea Mironescu (b. 1984) is a senior researcher at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research within Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania. In the past ten years she has published extensively on contemporary literature from Romania and beyond, focusing on fictional and generational representations of the recent past, as well as on gendered and ethnic memories. Between 2022 and 2024 she conducted a research project entitled The Novel of Memory in Postcommunism: Subgenres, Generations, Transnational Networks (MEMORO) and financed by the Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization. Currently she is a member of the project TRANSHIROL: A Transnational History of Romanian Literature, funded by the European Research Council. Her co-authored book on the novel of memory in postcommunist Romania will be released soon.
The masterclass is part of Connecting Emerging Literary Artists (CELA), a talent development project for the new generation of European literary voices across 11 different countries, supported by Creative Europe of the European Union.