Cristina Vatulescu

Relationship of literature to other disciplines, arts, and media; aesthetics and politics, law, and policing; artistic and extra-artistic genres, in particular the novel, autobiography, and the police file/film; documentary/fiction/metafiction; archival art and theory; intermedia; literary and film theory and history; embodied cognition; Russian and Romanian twentieth century culture; immigration and cultural exchange

Honors for Police Aesthetics: Winner of the 2011 Heldt Prize for the best book by a woman in any area of Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Studies. Winner of the 2011 Outstanding Academic Title Award, sponsored by Choice. One of the four books shortlisted for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences. Humanities Initiative Book Publication Support Grant, 2010; Goddard Fellowship, New York University, Fall 2010; Harvard Society of Fellows (2005-2008); William F. Milton Fund of Harvard University Research Grant, 2006; Derek Bok Prizes for Excellence in Teaching (2001, 2002)

Cristina Vatulescu received her Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Harvard in 2005 and came to NYU after a year as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her book, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and The Secret Police (Stanford UP, 2010), a study of the relationships between cultural and policing practices in twentieth century Eastern Europe, won the 2011 Heldt Prize and the 2011 Outstanding Academic Title Award, sponsored by Choice. She is also the co-editor of The Svetlana Boym Reader (Bloomsbury, 2018), and a Perspectives on Europe special issue on Secrecy (2014).  Her articles have appeared in diacritics, Comparative Literature, Poetics Today, Law and Literature, Film and Literature Quarterly, and The Brooklyn Rail. Cristina is currently finishing a book project entitled Illegible Archives? Challenges of Reading an Archival Revolution, and has started work on a new book project entitled Arts of Attention: A Literary Seed Bank.

Books and Edited Volumes

The Svetlana Boym Reader; co-edited with Tamar Abramov, Nicole G. Burgoyne, Julia Chadaga, Jacob Emery, and Julia Vaingurt; Bloomsbury Academic Press; 2018.

Cultură si poliție secretă in comunism. Polirom: 2017. (Romanian translation of Police Aesthetics, revised by the author)

Secrecy, Spectacle, Power. Special Issue of Perspectives on Europe, co-edited with Neringa Klumbytė, 45, no. 1, (spring 2015).

Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police Archives in Soviet Times, Stanford University Press, 2010. Paperback edition, 2013. 

Articles

“Police Files: An Intermedia Genre” in The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities, Oxford: 2020, 799-820.

“Foucault in Poland: A Silent Archive,” co-authored with Anna Krakus, Diacritics, 47, no. 2 (2019): 72-105.

“Luminosities: An Introduction,” in The Svetlana Boym Reader, Bloomsbury: 2018, Tamar Abramov, Nicole G. Burgoyne, Julia Chadaga, Jacob Emery, Julia Vaingurt, Cristina Vatulescu, p. 1-11.

“Freedom, Subjectivity, and the Gulag,” in The Svetlana Boym Reader, Bloomsbury: 2018, 299-301.

"Afterimages: Svetlana Boym’s Irrepressible Cocreations,” Diacritics, 43, no. 3 (2015), forthcoming.
               
"Art and Law Enforcement in a Ring Box: TALWST’s Miniature Aesthetic Revolution,” The Brooklyn Rail, February 2016.
 
“Translating Secrecy: The Birth of the Iron Curtain Viewed from the West, the East, and Right Under” Perspectives on Europe, 45, no. 1 (2015): 25-40.
 
“Editors' Note”, co-authored with Neringa Klumbytė, Perspectives on Europe, 45, no. 1 (2015): 6-11.
 
“Prisons into Museums: Fashioning a Post Communist Place of Memory,” Rites of Place, Julie Bucker and Emily Johnson, eds., Northwestern University Press, 2013.
 
“The Medium on Trial: Orson Welles Takes on Kafka and Cinema,” Literature & Film Quarterly, 41, no. 1 (2013).
 
 “'The Face to Face Encounter of Art and Law:’ Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up,” lead article, Law and Literature, 23, no 2 (2011): 173-194.
 
“Early Cinematic Representations of the Gulag: The Camp as Soviet Exotica in A. Cherkasov’s Solovki,” Gulag Studies, 2-3 (2009-2010): 21-36.
 
“The Politics of Estrangement: Tracking Shklovsky's Device through Literary and Policing Practices.” Poetics Today, 27, no. 1 (2006): 35-66.
 
“Chronique d’un été.” Encyclopedia of Documentary Film, ed. Ian Aitken, Routledge: New York, 2005.
 
“Arresting Biographies: Secret Police Files in the Soviet Union and Romania.” Comparative Literature, 56, no. 3 (2004): 243-261.(6th most-frequently cited article from Comparative Literature as of March 1st, 2010)