Adela Hîncu, PhD

Adela Hîncu is an intellectual historian whose work focuses on the history of social sciences, Marxist social theory, and women’s political thought in Romania and East Central Europe after the Second World War.

At the Institute of Contemporary History, she is carrying out the project “Transnational sociology and concepts of social expertise in Eastern Europe, 1970s–2000s” (TransSocio) as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow (September 2024–February 2027). TransSocio is a digital humanities and intellectual history interdisciplinary project that aims to recover Eastern European socialist sociologists’ contribution at the conceptual toolkit of social expertise beyond their national contexts in the late socialist period. By focusing on their involvement in regional, transregional, and international epistemic networks, it follows their input, before and after socialism, at defining the global social challenges of their time and a European vision of social justice and solidarity for the future. You can follow project updates at https://transsocio.inz.si/.

Adela holds a PhD in Comparative History from Central European University, and has been a visiting professor at Ilia State University (Tbilisi), and fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), New Europe College (Bucharest), Center for Advanced Study Sofia, Alexandru Dragomir Institute of Philosophy (Bucharest), and Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena.

She is a part-time postdoctoral researcher in the project “Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis” (PHILSE) at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, and an affiliated researcher in the ERC-project “The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East central Europe, 1929–2001” (HERESSEE), hosted at the University of Vienna.

As a member of the research network Intellectual History in East Central Europe, she works towards expanding the geographical scope, methods, and source base in the field of intellectual history beyond a focus on elite actors, textual sources, and the history of political thought. She has co-organized and participated at workshops on these topics in Ljubljana, Jena, Belgrade, and Budapest.

She is co-organizer of the Historical Materialism Cluj/Kolozsvár Conference, and member of the LeftEast editorial collective.

Selected publications:

Edited volumes

• Zsófia Lóránd, Adela Hîncu, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz, eds. Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’s Rights East Central Europe, Second Half of the Twentieth Century. Budapest–New York: CEU Press, 2024. Print and open access.
• Adela Hîncu and Victor Karady, eds. Social Sciences in the “Other Europe” since 1945. Budapest: Pasts Inc, Center for Historical Studies, CEU, 2018.

Articles and book chapters

• Una Blagojević and Adela Hîncu. “Productivity, the Humanization of Work, and the Future of Labor: Insights from Industrial Psychology in Late Socialist Yugoslavia and Romania.” Labor History, September 2024, 1–20.
• Adela Hîncu and Agata Zysiak. “Socialist Culture, Participation and Expert Knowledge in Poland and Romania in the Long 1960s.” European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire 30, no. 2 (2023): 234–56. doi:10.1080/13507486.2023.2189090.
• Adela Hîncu and Ştefan Baghiu. “Existentialism, Existentialists, and Marxism: From Critique to Integration within the Philosophical Establishment in Socialist Romania.” Studies in Eastern Eurupean Thought 75 (2023): 455–477.
• Adela Hîncu. “Social Science and Marxist Humanism beyond Collectivism in Socialist Romania.” History of the Human Sciences, 35, no. 2 (2022): 77-100.
• Adela Hîncu. “Ambivalentes Empowerment. Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung über die Ungleichstellung von Frauen im spätsozialistischen Rumänien.” In Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 2022, 105–126. Berlin: Metropol Verlag.
• Adela Hîncu. “Academic Mobility and Epistemological Change in State Socialist Romania: Three Generations of Sociologists, Western Social Science, and Quality of Life Research.” Serendipities. Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences 5 no. 1-2 (2021).