Dr. Cătălina Andricioaei

My post-doctoral research project builds on a denunciation letter I discovered in the archives of the former political police (Securitate). In the letter, a battered wife, V., denounced her husband, whom she refers to as "țigan," for political crimes. Yet the 11-page, hand-written letter she delivered to the Securitate officers described in painstaking detail the domestic abuse she had been suffering at the hands of her spouse. My research, therefore, will ask questions such as "What does V.’s choice to racialize her abusive husband reveal about intimate violence, domesticity, gendered strategies, state welfare, and the idea of ‘race’ in relation to marginalized ethnicity?" Drawing on oral history interviews and country-wide archives, my aim is twofold. First, to interview Romani women is to re-place them at the heart of society as socialist citizens. Yet I do not treat the inclusion of Romani women’s experiences as compensatory history. Placing them at the heart of society affords new understandings of state socialism in Romania, which stands revealed as simultaneously more racist and less iron-fisted than presumed. Second, by bringing Romani wives’ experiences of domestic abuse in dialogue with non-Romani wives’, my project enriches methodological and conceptual feminist understandings of women as both shaped by, and shaping, the socialist patriarchal family, intimate violence, state welfare, and the ethnoracializing of Romani bodies as "țigan" behaviour.

2017–2023
PhD in Social History, European University Institute, Florence, Italy

2016–2017
M.A. in Russian and East European Studies (Research Track), University of Nottingham, UK 

2013–2016
B.A. in History with First Class Honours, University of Nottingham, UK