Book Talk: In Search of the Perfect Romanian

Join us as we hear from author Professor Marius Turda on his new book In Search of the Perfect Romanian: National Specificity, Racial Degeneration, and Social Selection in Modern Romania in conversation with Professor Dan Stone. This event is held as part of the .

In Search of the Perfect Romanian centres on debates about the Romanian national character and race between 1880s and 1950s. It argues that during the early 1940s anti-Semitism and anti-Roma racism contributed directly to the programme of ethnic purification pursued by the Antonescu regime. Racism and eugenics explain not just the deportation and M**der of the Jews but also the deportation and M**der of the Roma. The Holocaust in Romania should therefore be understood as the result not just of anti-Semitism but also of biopolitical nationalism. Finally, the book suggests that the eugenic ideal of the ‘perfect’ Romanian did not disappear in 1945 but was embedded in the socialist definitions of the ‘new man’ and ‘perfect’ society emerging under communism.

Marius Turda is Professor and Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University. He is founding director of the Cantemir Institute at the University of Oxford, founder of the Working Group in the History of Race and Eugenics, and founder of the Centre for the History of Eugenics and Racism in Cluj-Napoca. His most recent publications include In Search of the Perfect Romanian: National Specificity, Racial Degeneration and Social Selection in Modern Romania (2026; Romanian editions 2024, 2025); From Greater Hungary to Greater Romania: Blood, Race and Nation (2026)

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of over 100 scholarly articles and some 25 books, including, most recently: The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Penguin, 2023); Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (OUP, 2023), among others. His next book is a history of the Holocaust in Romania, to be published by Penguin in early 2027.