Guest Lecture - Spaces and Places Apart: Scotland and Transylvania in the European Imagination
Guest lecture by Associate Professor Adriana Neagu (Babeș-Bolyai University).
The presentation is an attempt at re-signifying images of Scotland and Transylvania in the context of Greater European imagination. Identifying Highlands and Maramureș as spaces and places apart in the cultural geography and mythography of Europe, the research undertakes to observe their mythographic profile intrinsically and as a European added value.
While premised on the distinctiveness of Northern Scottish and Northern Transylvanian iconography, the fecund, enduring myth- and hero-making potential of the two regions, the paper will concentrate for the larger part on Scotland and Transylvania ascultural constructs and lieux de memoire in continental European imagination.
Adriana Neagu's primal concern is to unpack some of the dominant cultural inscriptions toward a revalorisation of Scottish and Transylvanian regional identity in the local-universal, national-global nexus. In so doing, she will inevitably revisit core cognitive and mythological loci, epic forms and oral traditions with a view to explore how the vast body of folktales, traditional fairy tales, ghost stories and dream allegories reverberate in European representations of the regions. Some comparative consideration will be given to mythical and archetypal patterns with emphasis on primitive doctrines and practices, extant archaic ritual forms, and superstition.
Adriana Neagu
Adriana Neagu, MA, MPhil, PhD is Associate Professor of Anglo-American studies at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Department of Applied Modern Languages. She is the author of Continental Perceptions of Englishness, Foreignness and the Global Turn (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), Sublimating the Postmodern Discourse: Toward a Post-Postmodern Fiction in The Writings of Paul Auster and Peter Ackroyd (Lucian Blaga University Press, 2001), In the Future Perfect: The Rise and Fall of Postmodernism (Lucian Blaga University Press, 2001), and of numerous critical and cultural theory articles.
Dr Neagu has been the recipient of several pre- and postdoctoral research awards. Previous academic affiliations include an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and visiting positions at Oxford University, University of Bergen, University of East Anglia, and University of London. Her teaching areas are diverse, combining literary-linguistic and cultural studies disciplines. Her main specialty is in modernist and postmodernist discourse, global theory, the poetics of translation and conference interpreting pedagogy.
Between 1999 and 2015, dr Neagu was Editor-in-Chief of American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, currently fulfilling the role of Associate Editor. She is a freelance translator and conference interpreter, conference interpreter trainer and certified cambridge speaking examiner.
E-mail: adriana.neagu@ubbcluj.ro