Teaching Slavic History in Romania in 2017

Abstract

The teaching of Slavic History in Romania has a tradition of over one century. It started systematically with the opening of the first chairs of «Slavic Philology» at the Bucharest and Iaşi Universities (Professors Ioan Bogdan, Ilie Bărbulescu) in 1891, respectively in 1905. Since then, Romanian universities have always had chairs and departments of Slavic Studies and Slavic History. At the University of Cluj, a Chair of Slavic and South-East-European History was founded in 1919. Today, Slavic languages, cultures and literatures are taught at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj, at the Faculty of Letters. At the Faculty of History and Philosophy of the same university I have been teaching a course entitled «Slavs and Slavonism in Romanian History» since 2005. My paper will discuss the cultural context for teaching Slavic history, language and cultures in today’s Romania, as well as several concrete teaching approaches I have adopted in this area. The students’ cultural and educational background is important: it is an interesting consequence of a larger cultural context and the teacher must adapt his discourse to it. I will also discuss the topics of the lectures, their structure, the sources we discuss in the seminars, and the literature offered to the students for reading.