Anca Parvulescu

​Professor of English
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Liselotte Dieckmann Professor of Comparative Literature
PhD, University of Minnesota
research interests:
  • Modernism
  • Literary and critical theory
  • Women and gender studies
  • American
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    • Washington University
    • CB 1122
    • One Brookings Drive
    • St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
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    Anca Parvulescu's research and teaching interests include international modernism, affect theory, literary and critical theory, comparative literature, and visual culture. 

    Professor Parvulescu is the author of Laughter: Notes on a Passion (MIT, 2010), The Traffic in Women’s Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2014), and Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022). 

    Professor Parvulescu is currently at work on her fourth book, Modernist Faces: Physiognomy and Facial Form. Prompted by recent debates about facial recognition technology and masking during the COVID pandemic, the book traces a cultural history of the face. 

    Laughter: Notes on a Passion (MIT Press, 2010) shows how literary and philosophical texts, in dialogue with conduct books and visual culture, produce a modern normative aesthetics of the smiling face as an alternative to the contorted face in laughter. The book is an attempt to extricate laughter from theories of the comic, humor, jokes, the grotesque etc, and redirect our attention to the burst of laughter itself. What kind of subjects are we when we laugh? 

    The Traffic in Women's Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2014) is an intervention in the heated debate on the making and unmaking of Europe in the wake of 1989. It argues that the critical project of pluralizing Europe needs to account for the Europe brought together through the circulation of East European women’s labor. Reading recent cinematic texts that critically frame this labor, the book shows East European migrant women, alongside women from the global South, becoming responsible for the biopolitical labor of reproduction, whether they work as domestics, nannies, nurses, sex workers, or wives.

    Co-authored with Manuela Boatca, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press) was supported by an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship. The book places Transylvania in inter-related debates in World Literature, World History and World-Systems Analysis. How does “the world” look like from the vantage point of a small village in Transylvania? The project places this multi-ethnic and multilingual region in a comparative framework that yields a fresh perspective on comparatism.  

    Professor Parvulescu’s articles have been published in PMLA, New Literary History, Critical Inquiry, Literature Compass, Interventions, Camera Obscura. 

    Most recently, she has been at work on a cluster of articles on the history of literary comparatism: “Istanbul, Capital of Comparative Literature”; “(Dis)Counting Languages: Between Hugo Meltzl and Liviu Rebreanu”; and “The World of World Literature and World-Systems Analysis.” 

    One of Professor Parvulescu’s recent courses is “The First Modern Novel,” a survey of novels considered “the first modern novel” around the world: Mohammed Hussein Haikal’s Zainab in Egypt, Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo in Japan, Rabindranath Tagore’s Chokher Bali in India, Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman in China, and Liviu Rebreanu’s Ion in Romania.

    Recent Publications

    Istanbul, Capital of Comparative Literature.” MLN 135, no. 5 (2020): 1232–57.

    The World of World Literature and World-Systems Analysis.” symploke 28. no 1-2 (2020): 375-383.

    (Dis)Counting Languages: Between Hugo Meltzl and Liviu Rebreanu," Journal of World Literature (2019). 

    Affect” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Thought, edited by Robin Truth Goodman (2019).   

    Courses

    • L93 205C: Literary Modernities: Text and Tradition
    • L14 311: Topics in English & American Literature: International Modernism
    • L14 3552: Introduction to Literary Theory
    • L14 E Lit 470: Research Lab: Affect in Feminist Theory
    • L14 523: Theories of Globalization
    • L14 E Lit 524: Seminar: International Modernism/World Literature
    Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires

    Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires

    Co-authored with Manuela Boatca, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022) was supported by an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship. The book places Transylvania in inter-related debates in World Literature, World History and World-Systems Analysis. How does “the world” look like from the vantage point of a small village in Transylvania? The project places this multi-ethnic and multilingual region in a comparative framework that yields a fresh perspective on the comparative method itself.

    The Traffic in Women's Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe

    The Traffic in Women's Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe

    “Welcome to the European family!” When East European countries joined the European Union under this banner after 1989, they agreed to the free movement of goods, services, capital, and persons. In this book, Anca Parvulescu analyzes an important niche in this imagined European kinship: the traffic in women, or the circulation of East European women in West Europe in marriage and as domestic servants, nannies, personal attendants, and entertainers. Analyzing film, national policies, and an impressive range of work by theorists from Giorgio Agamben to Judith Butler, she develops a critical lens through which to think about the transnational continuum of “women’s work.”

    Laughter: Notes on a Passion

    Laughter: Notes on a Passion

    Most of our theories of laughter are not concerned with laughter. Rather, their focus is the laughable object, whether conceived of as the comic, the humorous, jokes, the grotesque, the ridiculous, or the ludicrous. In Laughter, Anca Parvulescu proposes a return to the materiality of the burst of laughter itself. She sets out to uncover an archive of laughter, inviting us to follow its rhythms and listen to its tones.