Speaker: Mihai-Dan Cirjan, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Central European University and New York University
After completing his Bachelor degree at the University of Bucharest, Mihai-Dan Cirjan spent most of his graduate years at CEU’s Department of History. His research interests include comparative historical sociology, labour and peasant studies, economic sociology, and the political economy of Eastern Europe, with a focus on the first decades following the Great Depression. His dissertation project looks at the restructuring of the Romanian financial system after 1929, with an emphasis on the state’s sovereign debt and on the private debt of Romanian rural communities. The dissertation aims at providing a historical sociological analysis that fleshes out the way in which the interwar capitalist crisis reconfigured the relationship between political subjects, state institutions and the economic field. The outcome of these changes, the post-liberal capitalist state developed in Romania throughout the 1930s, represented a global co-creation: the result of a constant interaction between international organizations and expertise networks (League of Nations, transnational creditors, central banks) and local class dynamics. He is currently planning to develop his research into a post-doc project through a comparison with interwar Yugoslavia and Argentina.
The Science, Technology, and Knowledge (SKAT) workshop is a forum for the seminar-style presentation and discussion of graduate student work in the sociology of expertise, the sociology of professions, actor-network approaches, medical sociology, science studies, etc. The workshop is hosted by Columbia Sociology but welcomes graduate students from all institutions and disciplines.
