Anca Parvulescu's research and teaching interests include global modernism, literary and critical theory, literary comparatism, migration studies, and East Europe.
Anca Parvulescu is the author of three books: Laughter: Notes on a Passion (MIT Press, 2010); The Traffic in Women’s Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2014); and, with Manuela Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022). Parvulescu’s articles have been published in PMLA, New Literary History, Critical Inquiry, Literature Compass, Interventions, Camera Obscura. Her work has been funded by the ACLS, the Huntington Library, the American Councils for International Education, the McDonnell Academy, and the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St Louis. She has received the Outstanding Mentor Award and the Miriam Bailin Prize for Teaching.
Parvulescu is currently at work on two book projects: Modernist Faces: Physiognomy and Facial Form argues that contemporary technologies of facial recognition embed a form of the face inherited from physiognomy, which was both reproduced and challenged by modernist authors. An article from this project, “The Biography of a Face: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” appeared in Journal of Modern Literature.
The second project, The Birth of Comparison, traces the emergence of the discipline of Comparative Literature and the comparative method in a number of cultural geographies around the world. Parvulescu has written a cluster of articles on literary comparatism: “Istanbul, Capital of Comparative Literature”; “(Dis)Counting Languages: Between Hugo Meltzl and Liviu Rebreanu”; and “The World of World Literature and World-Systems Analysis.”
Parvulescu’s most recent book, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires, co-authored with Manuela Boatcă (Freiburg University, Germany), bridges debates in world literature and world-systems analysis to ask how “the world” looks like from the perspective of a small village in Transylvania, historically situated at the crossroads of multiple empires. The book won three academic awards: the René Wellek Prize for Best Book in Comparative Literature, offered by the American Comparative Literature Association; the Barrington Moore Award for Best Book in Comparative and Historical Sociology, offered by the American Sociological Association; and an Honorable Mention of the Immanuel Wallerstein Award, also offered by the American Sociological Association. It is forthcoming in Romanian and German translations.
The Traffic in Women's Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe participates in debates on Europeanization following the EU expansion into East Europe. It argues that the critical project of pluralizing Europe needs to account for the Europe brought together through the circulation of East European women’s labor. Reading recent cinematic texts that critically frame this labor, the book shows East European migrant women, alongside women from the global South, becoming responsible for the biopolitical labor of reproduction, whether they work as domestics, nannies, nurses, sex workers, or wives. Contributions to two handbooks on migration are forthcoming.
Laughter: Notes on a Passion argues for the importance of considering the burst of laughter as an object of analysis, apart from comedy, humor, and jokes. The book has inspired art exhibits in New York and Hamburg and a number of adjacent publications, including translations into French and Turkish. Parvulescu contributed the entry on “Laughter” to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. “Even Laughter? From Laughter in the Magic Theater to the Laughter Assembly Line,” appeared in Critical Inquiry, in a special issue on theories of laughter, which also included “Essay on Laughter,” by Norbert Elias, edited by Parvulescu.