Professor Delia Popescu to Serve on MULTIPAST Project, Guest of IWM

Professor Delia Popescu, chair of the Political Science Department, has been invited to serve on the scientific committee of MULTIPAST – Transitional Justice for Multiple Pasts, a five-year research project recently awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant and hosted by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu in Romania.

The ERC Advanced Grant is one of the most competitive research awards in Europe: this year only 319 of 3,329 proposals were funded. It is led by Professor Lavinia Stan, a leading Canadian scholar of transitional justice, and centers on a comparison of eight post-dictatorial and post-conflict societies across four world regions. The project breaks new ground by asking what happens when a post-dictatorial or post-conflict society must confront not one but several difficult pasts that demand recognition and repair simultaneously. Through a comparative study of eight cases across four world regions (Romania, Croatia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Vietnam, Tunisia, and Kenya) MULTIPAST is the first project to examine this problem systematically, with direct implications for public policy, democratization and human rights.

Popescu has also been selected as a guest of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, to work on her book project, “Archives and Ergoglossia: Gender and Romani Labor in Securitate Files.” The IWM is among the most distinguished institutes for advanced study in the humanities and social sciences in Europe and each year it draws roughly a hundred scholars, writers and public intellectuals to Vienna, chosen purely on the merit of their work.

“IWM has been a gathering place for serious thinking across the old East–West divide since long before such conversations were easy to have,” said Popescu. “To be welcomed into that setting is among the more meaningful recognitions a scholar in my area can receive.”

“Professor Popescu has long been recognized as an expert in comparative political theory and both these invitations reflect how highly-regarded she is with her international peers,” said Le Moyne President Linda LeMura. “We are thrilled that she will be making significant contributions on a global scale.”

Popescu is also currently completing two edited volumes: You Say You Want a Revolution? Lessons from East Central Europe in 1989 (Bloomsbury, 2026), and The Afterlife of Dissent: Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” in Contemporary Perspective (forthcoming, 2027).