Join us on November 4, 2026 for our annual Heuss Lecture featuring Manuela Boatca. She will be presenting her lecture, "Otherwise Modern Subjects: Enslaved Roma in the Making of European Romania"

In the mid-nineteenth century, the term 'Romania' began to be used for two seemingly unrelated geopolitical projects. France, which had 'lost' its most valuable Caribbean colony after the Haitian Revolution (and had also recently sold Louisiana to the United States), used 'New Romania' to refer to Romance-speaking, Catholic countries in the Americas. This was an attempt to maintain political and cultural control in the region. Meanwhile, in Moldavia and Wallachia, the label 'Romania' was used for the unification project into one modern nation-state, with the Romance language of the principalities being one of the project's main pillars. The abolition of the five-hundred-year enslavement of Roma people in these territories, modelled on the abolition of slavery in France, was the other pillar. In this lecture, Manuela Boatcă draws on Michel-Rolph Trouillot's notion of 'the otherwise modern', coined in reference to enslavement on Caribbean plantations, to draw historical connections between these two Romanias. She discusses parallels between global regimes of enslavement and their mobilization for white nationalist projects within a transatlantic dialogue on slavery and abolition.