Alexandru Simon

Biography

The first research interests of Alexandru Simon (born 1979), as a BA student of the Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj (1998-2002), focused on 19th century national ideologies, symbolic geographies, as well on 20th century geopolitics and population transfers. Quite soon it turned out that several answers and interpretations, from executive decisions to nation-building, had relied – mainly on ‘East-Central European’ soil and especially in the case of modern Romania – on rather partial perspectives of earlier events. His attention therefore shifted to ‘medieval geopolitics’ and to medieval power relations (whether between monarchs or between states and subjects). Fellowships (2000 to 2007) at European universities (Geneva, Paris IV-Sorbonne or Vienna) aided him in pursuing these analysis without completely breaking off the ties with his earlier research interests. He began to rely heavily on unedited medieval sources, still preserved in the archives and libraries of Budapest, Genoa, Milan, Innsbruck, Paris, Vienna, Rome, Venice or Prague. After defending his PhD thesis on East-Central Europe and the concept of Gate of Christendom in the Late Middle Ages (2008), he became a research-fellow of the Romanian Academy. At present (since 2010), Alexandru Simon, alumnus of the New Europe College in Bucharest (2009), is deputy-director and director of EU funded research projects and grants (based on a Austrian-French-German-Romanian partnership), especially for post-doctoral fellows. His other recent (since 2011) administrative duties and scientific interests revolve around his tasks as co-editor of Eastern and Central European Studies series, published with Peter Lang, and his researches on the eastern policies of the House of Habsburg, the later crusades in Milanese dispacci, as well as on DNA analysis in the study of ‘medieval ethnogenesis’.