Ass.-Prof. Dr. Valeska BOPP-FILIMONOV (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)
Dr. Adrian-Nicolae FURTUNĂ (Institute for Quality of Life of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest)
Dr. Cosmin KOSZOR-CODREA (New Europe College, Bucharest)
Dr. Cosmin MINEA (Masaryk University, Brno)

Abstract:
Our project explores how landscapes around the Southeastern Carpathian Mountains were experienced, transformed, contested and reimagined between the 1830s and the 1940s under expanding extractive regimes. Bringing together perspectives from environmental history, social history, heritage studies, and literary studies, the discussion examines logging, drilling, mining, and agrarian restructuring as sites of unequal and racialized ecological change. Focusing on the relation between inter-imperial expansion, nation-state reframing, and capitalist interests, the speakers will highlight how extractive logics reconfigured human relations, created environmental violence, generated resistance to exploitation and binary tensions between human–nonhuman relations across a politically fragmented region. By foregrounding a postcolonial ecocriticism, intersectional, and multispecies approach to historical and literary sources, the WOUND project seeks to challenge both Western-centric and national narratives of modernity. It aims to situate the Carpathians within wider transregional debates on environmental injustices and provide an introductory critique of its ethnoracial, anthropocentric, and nationalist ecological cultures.

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This seminar is organized within the Environmental Humanities research group at NEC, supported by UEFISCDI – The Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding of the Ministry of Research and Education of Romania (PN-IV-P8-8.1-PRE-HE-ORG-2023-0055).