Cristina Bejan and Paul Kenyon INTELLECTUALS AND FASCISM IN ROMANIA

Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania

In 1930s Bucharest, some of the country's most brilliant young intellectuals converged to form the Criterion Association. Bound by friendship and the dream of a new, modern Romania, their members included historian Mircea Eliade, critic Petru Comarnescu, Jewish playwright Mihail Sebastian and a host of other philosophers and artists. Together, they built a vibrant cultural scene that flourished for a few short years, before fascism and scandal splintered their ranks. Cristina A. Bejan asks how the far-right Iron Guard came to eclipse the appeal of liberalism for so many of Romania's intellectual elite, drawing on diaries, memoirs and other writings to examine the collision of culture and extremism in the interwar years. The first English-language study of Criterion and the most thorough to date in any language, this book grapples with the complexities of Romanian intellectual life in the moments before collapse.

Cristina Bejan

Living and creating in Paris, France, Cristina Bejan, DPhil (Oxon) is a dual-citizen of Romania and the USA. Bejan is an award-winning, multilingual historian, theatre artist and spoken word poet. An Oxford DPhil and a recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship and a Fulbright, she has held fellowships at the Aspen Ideas Festival, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Georgetown University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and has taught history at five universities and one community college. She has also served as Guest Lecturer for the Foreign Service Institute and the Romanian-American University (Bucharest). In 2025 the Rhodes Trust awarded Bejan with the George Parkin Distinguished Service Award.

Paul Kenyon

Paul Kenyon is an award-winning journalist who has worked for almost twenty years across BBC News and Current Affairs. In 2005 he was the first reporter to film Iran's secret nuclear sites, making an hour-long documentary which was shown around the world. For four years Paul had his own series on BBC One,Kenyon Confronts which used secret filming to expose corruption in areas as diverse as horse-racing, the Catholic Church and immigration. At its peak it was the most watched current affairs programme on the BBC. Paul currently works onPanoramaand he became friends with Justice Amin while researching a two-part story on African migrants for the programme in 2007.

Marius Turda

Professor Marius Turda has been teaching at Oxford Brookes since 2005. He is the founder director of the Cantemir Institute at the University of Oxford (2012-2013) and founder of the Working Group on the History of Eugenics and Race (HRE), established in 2006. In 2022 he was awarded the Order of the Centenary by Her Majesty Margaret, Custodian of the Royal House of Romania.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Blackwell's, Broad Street Oxford