The project analyzes the integration mechanisms of the Islamic institutions (Muftiates, Muslim Communities, Qadiates) in the Romanian bureaucracy and identifies their role in the community’s modernization process from 1878 to 1947. Based on Romanian and Turkish primary and secondary sources, this research intends to explain why there was no set of rules legislated to establish the functioning of these institutions and to determine the effects of this legal vacuum on the Muslim community.

An article summing up Metin Omer’s experience as a NEC Fellow is available in Research in View: 2024/2025 Fellows’ Essays.

Cătălin Pavel’s Animalele care ne fac oameni. Blană, cozi și pene în arheologie (Humanitas, 2021) is a non-fiction volume of archaeology/history that bridges the gap between academia and the general public. Born out of a science communication project, it retains a substantial bibliography, but no footnotes. In it, Pavel investigated the way humans interacted with animals – chapters on dogs, cats, horses, but also whales, hedgehogs, birds, and bears – throughout prehistory and the Classical Antiquity. Pavel set off to study, with archaeological methods, the interaction between human persons and non-human persons, and to prove that animals have been a major catalyst of our cognitive and emotional development.