Arleen Ionescu
Welcome to my personal research website, where you will see my main past and current research projects, major publications, a short blurb about what I called ‘memorial ethics’ in one of my monographs, and my academic profile. You will also find a set of relevant academic links to click on further down on the page.
current research
With my colleague Dumitru Tucan, I have completed the first-ever synthesis on the representation of the Romanian Holocaust (memoirs, oral testimonies, fiction, films) from 1945 to the present, including both what was published within Romania’s borders and in the diaspora. Also briefly referring to what has been written on these narratives so far, we hope that this momentous study over 30,000 words long, ‘Representations of the Romanian Holocaust in Testimonial Literature and Films: From Trivialization, Denial to Working through the Past’, in two parts (Part 1, Part 2), will become a landmark in mapping the Romanian Holocaust for specialists from various fields. A follow-up to this study is the first comprehensive ‘Bibliography on the Holocaust and Anti-Semitism in Romania’.
In 2023 I co-edited (with Simona Mitroiu) a special issue of UK-based journal Parallax titled ‘Holocaust Narratives in the Post-Testimonial Era’ (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/tpar20/29/1), which attempts to define the critical notion of the post-testimonial, a conceptual cornerstone of my ongoing and future work on the Holocaust. With my co-editors Dana Mihăilescu and Adrian Tudurachi, I have just finished editing a special issue of Word and Text entitled ‘Memory in Exile: 80 Years since the Liberation of the Nazi Camps’ (https://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro/No_1_2025.html).
At present I am working on a special themed issue of Arcadia, titled ‘20th-Century Jewish Exile Remembered’, to be co-edited with Leona Toker and Edward Waysband (forthcoming in 2026).
I am finalizing the first-ever full-length volume dedicated to a corpus of narratives containing memoirs and diaries, edited oral histories, as well as hybrid narratives written by or on behalf of Jewish refugees, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, who fled to safety in Shanghai during World War Two. Added to these is another group of memoirs and diaries, those of the Jews who were already living in Shanghai by the time these Jewish refugees set foot in the city. Although their escape to Shanghai was previously studied by historians, these narratives have not yet been properly integrated into the growing literature on refugees. Part One offers a full reconstruction of the Shanghai Jewish refugees’ lives, based not only on historical sources but also witnesses’ accounts which enrich historians’ findings, while Parts Two and Three bring together memory and trauma studies as well as a gendered perspective by distinguishing between male and female narrators’ voices. This two-part structure follows the refugees’ steps from trauma to healing through a psychoanalytic lens based on Judith Herman’s findings about working through traumatic events and healing. The Epilogue features my exchange with two Shanghai-born Jewish women: Aileen Jacobson, whose parents arrived in Shanghai from Germany, and Lily Klebanoff Blake, whose parents, Russian Jews, were already in Shanghai after moving from Harbin.
Arleen Ionescu - Research in Memory / Trauma / Holocaust Studies 