Monica Spiridon, born in Craiova, Romania, in 1948. Ph.D. from the University of Bucharest. Associate Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bucharest.
During my two months at NIAS, I put the finishing touches on my contributions for the international synthesis: “The Comparative History of the Literatures of East-Central Europe: Cultural Junctures and Disjunctures in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries”, to be published by Oxford University Press. I have finished three chapters of the book. I have also written the drafts and submitted the abstracts of tentative papers for several international conferences, to be held between August 1999 and August 2000. “Bucharestsur-
la-Seine ou le Petit Paris: un stereotype de l’identité culturelle roumaine” (International Comparative Literature Association Conference: Multiculturalism, Identities, Literature, L’université Francaise du Pacifique, Papeete, August 1999); “Inventing Romania: Nationalism and Literature in the Twentieth Century” (ICLA Research Committee on the Comparative Study of Cultural and Literary Identity Conference: Culture and Nation at the Turn of the Millenium, Tartu, October 1999); “Run-away Identities. The Quest for the Other in European Travel Writings: J.M.G. le Clezio, Mircea Eliade, Thomas Mann”
( ICLA Committee Studies on Voyage in Literature Workshop, Mosel-Bay, South Africa, August 2000); “History, Literature, Identity at the Margins of Western (Post)Modernity” (XVIth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, Pretoria, August 2000. Workshop: Postmodernity, History and Literary Culture: Explanation and Understanding of Diversity). Offprints
of the Proceedings of these international conferences will be sent to the NIAS library.