Dr. Anca Diana Axinia

Professional Background

Anca Diana Axinia received her PhD from the European University Institute in Florence for her dissertation, “Women and Politics in the Romanian Legionary Movement,” which focused on women’s participation and gender relations in the Romanian Legionary Movement. This was among the first systematic attempts to reconstruct women’s roles and activities in the movement and to analyze the role played by gender in its discourses and practices. 

Dr. Axinia has received several fellowships, including the New Europe College Fellowship in Bucharest, where she conducted preliminary research on the gender dimensions of the Bucharest pogrom in Romanian archives. She was also a visiting fellow in the program “Violence in East and West – Towards an Integrated History of 20th Century Europe,” hosted by the University of Konstanz in Germany.

Dr. Axinia has presented her research at various conferences and universities, including the Universities of Uppsala, Vienna, Dusseldorf, the European University Institute, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, and the Institute for Balkan Studies in Belgrade. Her research has also been published in the European Review of History and edited volumes by Brill and Bloomsbury Academic.

Fellowship Research

Anca Diana Axinia was awarded the Manya Friedman Memorial Fellowship for her research project, “Gender and the Representation of Violence in the Bucharest Pogrom,” which will examine the interrelations between gender, the representation of violence, and transitional justice related to the Bucharest pogrom (1941). Dr. Axinia's research aims to assess how many Legionary women took part in the pogrom, who these women were, and what role, if any, they had in the Legionary Movement before these events. She also aims to analyze the ways gendered beliefs and stereotypes shaped the narratives, perceptions, and judgments of violence. The participation of Legionary women and the representation of their violence will be analyzed in the context of the particularities of transitional justice legal proceedings in Romania. 

The fellowship allows Dr. Axinia access to a wide range of documents, court records, photographs, and memoirs related to the Bucharest pogrom and the Holocaust in Romania, as well as life in Romanian Jewish communities before the Holocaust. She will also analyze oral interviews and postwar testimonies for their centrality in the representation and memory of violence. 

Residency Period: January 1, 2025–April 30, 2025