Memory and Its Complex Legacies: Ioana Macrea-Toma at the 2025 ASEEES Convention
The 2025 ASEEES Convention focused on the theme of Memory as a key category of analysis for scholars of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The program invited participants to reflect on how personal, collective, and institutional memories shape understandings of the past, and how political and cultural actors influence processes of remembering and forgetting.
Our colleague Ioana Macrea-Toma contributed an online presentation titled “Oral History for Intellectual Biographies: Ornament or Essential Correctives to Archival/Textual Biases?” Her paper addressed the methodological value of oral history for reconstructing intellectual biographies that have been stigmatized or obscured in post-1989 contexts. By examining the epistemological frameworks of Radio Free Europe’s research papers, from the collection of Blinken OSA Archivum, and comparing them with those of the secret police, she discussed how one can work with divergent institutional perspectives and their seemingly opposed narratives about dissenters and still recuperate coherent intellectual biographies. She showed how ideologically opposed Cold War archival sources only differently refract phenomena, and do not offer irreconcilable counter-stories.
The 2025 ASEEES Convention focused on the theme of Memory as a key category of analysis for scholars of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The program invited participants to reflect on how personal, collective, and institutional memories shape understandings of the past, and how political and cultural actors influence the processes of remembering and forgetting. The 2025 ASEEES Convention focused on the theme of Memory as a key category of analysis for scholars of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The program invited participants to reflect on how personal, collective, and institutional memories shape understandings of the past, and how political and cultural actors influence the processes of remembering and forgetting.
