Emanuela Grama

Emanuela Grama specializes in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, with a focus on urban politics, processes of state-making, property, memory, and cultural change in 20th- and 21st-century Romania. She is an associate professor of cultural anthropology and modern European history in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. This essay is adapted from her book Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania (Indiana University Press, 2019), which was the winner of the 2020 Ed Hewett book prize offered by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for “an outstanding monograph on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe.”