Raluca Iacob (PhD)

Winter Semester 2019/2020

Raluca Iacob is an independent researcher and curator at the Astra Film Festival in Sibiu, Romania. She is spending this winter semester at the University of Graz as a research fellow in the field of excellence “Dimensions of Europeanization.” During her stay in Graz, Iacob is conducting research about border narratives in film in the European periphery. She aims to research these narratives in the context of migration, the refugee crisis, and the increasing popularity of far-right politics. Iacob analyses how certain movie scenes illustrate who and what is admissible to cross a given border. While cross-border commerce makes goods admissible, migrants and refugees are often rejected; they are seen as the “inadmissible other.” Using these foundations she will discuss the ways in which film narratives construct the idea of the European border.

"The time at the University of Graz offers me a great opportunity to focus on my research and take a step back from my work at a film festival. My research can be seen as a part of a larger project focused on Eastern European cinemas as representations of peripheries."

Iacob finished her PhD in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, where she also worked as a teaching assistant. Her main research interests lie in world cinema, documentary studies, communist and post-communist cinema, and critical theory. Her work was featured in the magazines Film Criticism, Frames, Apparatus Journal, and in the edited collection New Romanian Cinema, and is forthcoming in the edited monograph Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and Global Circuits.

Brown Bag: Outlining Film: European Cinema and Border Narratives