Short bio:
Simina (she/her) is based at the University of Cambridge, where she is a Research Fellow at Queens' College and an Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Sociology. Prior to that, she was an ESRC-funded PhD Candidate also at Cambridge. Her research sits at the intersection of the sociology of race, political sociology, critical education studies and memory studies. Together with Dr Ali Meghji, she co-founded the Catalysts for Decolonization lab at the Cambridge Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. She teaches on eugenics, nationalism, settler colonialism and the construction of 'Europe' at the University of Cambridge.
Long bio:
Simina (she/her) is a Research Fellow at Queens' College at the University of Cambridge. Prior to that, she was an ESRC-funded PhD Candidate also at Cambridge. Her research sits at the intersection of the sociology of race, political sociology, critical education studies and memory studies. She is currently working on a monograph based on her PhD research.
Her PhD research explored the relationship between racism and collective memory, asking how understandings of the (national) past can become media of racialisation. She understands nations as hegmeonic projects which necessitate a historical commonsense for their functioning and reproduction. With Omi and Winant (2014), she conceptualises nationalism as a racial project for the racialised distribution of rights, resources, recognition and representation within the nation-state form. Empirically and more specifically, she looks at the way educational materials produce a racialised historical commonsense in Romania, and uncovers the link between nationalism and anti-Roma racism. She has also published on the so-called 'free speech' crisis and on race and education.
Together with Dr Ali Meghji, she co-founded the Catalysts for Decolonization lab at the Cambridge Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. She teaches on eugenics, nationalism, settler colonialism and the construction of 'Europe'.