Simina Dragoș (she/her)

In 2016 I moved to Cambridge, UK, to become an undergraduate student at Emmanuel College and the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. I graduated with a double First Class BA in 2019. That same year, I joined Fitzwilliam College Cambridge for my MPhil in Education (2019-2020) from which I graduated with Distinction. During this time, I was supervised by Prof Joanne Dillabough. 

I was fortunate enough to be offered a Cambridge ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership full scholarship to stay on for my PhD at the University of Cambridge (2020-2025), under the supervision of Prof Joanne Dillabough and Dr Ali Meghji. My PhD sat at the intersection of critical education studies, memory studies and political sociology. You can read more about my PhD on the Research tab of this website. 

At the moment, I am part of the fellowship of Queens' College at the University of Cambridge, where my primary responsibility is research. I am also an Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, where I teach on the course Sociology of Empire, Imperialism and Colonialism led by Dr Ali Meghji. I have been teaching in different higher education institutions since 2020; you can find more about my teaching experience and philosophy on the Teaching tab of this website. 

Through my research ageanda, I seek to create historicized transdisciplinary research which addresses the justification, normalisation and production of inequality within modernity. I am particularly interested in 'race', broadly understood, as a global system of classification, dehumanisation and inequality. I think of modernity as inherently intertwined with coloniality and imperialism, and am concerned with understanding how coloniality (as a form of power) constantly reinvents itself, especially in places that are not neatly categorised in binaries such as North/South, colony/metropole. 

I am increasingly interested in the concept of inter-imperiality, and how it relates to socio-political developments in the East of Europe. A large part of my research to date has also focused on nationalism, nation-building and nation-states from the point of view of race and coloniality. However, my research interests are varied and broadly cover the application of state power in the cultural domain. I therefore learn from memory studies, critical education studies, the sociology of race and racism, political sociology, political theory, decolonial theory, nationalism studies, cultural studies. 

I aim to be a politically engaged and compassionate teacher, scholar, and colleague, and am a member of many communities at the University of Cambridge and beyond. With Dr Sophie Marie Niang and Dr Ali Meghji, I co-lead the Catalysts for Decolonisation research lab at Cambridge. 

When I'm not doing research or teaching, I enjoy fiction books, long walks, yoga and podcasts. I love getting lost in museums and bookstores, and spending time with family and friends.