Presenter: Dr. Mihaela Gligor, Senior Researcher at the Polish Institute for Advanced Studies, Warsaw.
Chair: Irina Sandormirskaja, Professor of Cultural Studies (CBEES)
Discussant: Dr. Julietta Rotaru, Research Leader in Romani Studies, Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES)

Mircea Eliade’s Myth and the Man behind it

Mircea Eliade (March 9, 1907 – April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, philosopher, fiction writer, essayist, and professor at the Divinity School, University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. He was the first who presented an astonishing variety of religious data and their basic patterns. Mircea Eliade’s investigation in the field of religious phenomenology has opened the way for many anthropologists and religious historians.

After I defended my doctoral thesis on the subject Mircea Eliade and the Romanian Right Extreme, I have been trying to focus on as many as possible aspects of Mircea Eliade’s personality and to bring to light novel documents (letters, manuscripts, testimonies) and details about the life and work of this great creator. By all my achievements, I have intended to release Mircea Eliade’s figure from any mythical boundaries and thus to capture his human side. I truly wanted to go beyond the myth of Eliade and so I did especially by the recovery and the publication of a significant part of his correspondence and by the discussions with former students and collaborators from the period of his scientific maturity. My aim was to provide the complete portrayal of the one who made a major change in various important domains of humanistic research, consequently putting together the multiple facets of Mircea Eliade’s character. Fantastic elements, religious symbolism, the fascination of the sacredness and the search for homo religiosus, India and religious pluralism, devotion to his projects or to his students and correspondents, the magic of literary writings or the boldness and enthusiasm of youth, these are only some of the aspects I have examined during this period of own intellectual quest and growth.

Mircea Eliade’s Myth and the Man behind it draws on the most significant research directions I have approached throughout these recent years. During this time, my scientific inquiry and my press-related events, as well as the historical (the recovery of various documents), philosophical, didactic or cultural activities have continued and complemented one another, the consequences and the results proving, most of the times, unparalleled. Each, taken as a part, and everything, taken as a whole, have contributed to the development of knowledge in the sphere of Romanian cultural studies and, particularly, to a better comprehension of Mircea Eliade, the man and the creator.

Biography

Mihaela GLIGOR studied Philosophy at Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where she also received her PhD in Philosophy in 2006, with a thesis on Mircea Eliade and Romanian Right Extreme. In 2016, she defended (at the same university) her Habilitation in History, working on the subject An Alternative Intellectual History of Mircea Eliade’s Myth. In 2009, she was a Fellow at Department of Philosophy, Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India, with an I.C.C.R. (Indian Council for Cultural Relations) Postdoctoral Scholarship (topic: The Nostalgia of Origins at Mircea Eliade and Rabindranath Tagore).

A specialist in Mircea Eliade’s life and work, and also interested in Philosophy and History of Religions, Indian Studies, and Interwar Intellectual History, Mihaela Gligor is now a Scientific Researcher in the field of Philosophy of Culture at The Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca Branch, “George Baritiu” History Institute, Department of Humanities; Director and founder of Cluj Center for Indian Studies from Babes-Bolyai University: http://indian.centre.ubbcluj.ro/; Associate Professor and PhD coordinator within the Doctoral School of International Relations and Security Studies at Babes-Bolyai University; and a member of The Romanian Writers Union, Cluj Branch.

She is the recipient of VIRA 2017 Research Awards: Outstanding Scientist in Humanities 2017 (History and Philosophy), offered by Venus International Research Foundation, Chennai, India: http://viraw.info/2017/hss/gligor.html
Mihaela Gligor is also the founder and Editor-in-chief of International Journal on Humanistic Ideology (2008), ISSN: 1844-458X (ISSN on-line: 2285-4517) and Romanian Journal of Indian Studies (2017), ISSN: 2601-064X, both indexed and abstracted in scientific international data bases and published at Cluj University Press.

Latest authored book: Orient şi Occident. Topografii ale simbolului la Mircea Eliade [Orient and Occident. Topographies of Symbol at Mircea Eliade], Cluj University Press, 2016, ISBN: 978-973-595-951-7 [E-book, ISBN 978-606-37-0007-1] http://www.editura.ubbcluj.ro/bd/ebooks/pdf/1958.pdf

Until 31 July 2019, Mihaela Gligor is a Senior Fellow in Residence, Polish Institute for Advanced Studies, Warsaw. Topic: (In)Tolerance. Cultural and Political Interactions in Interwar Europe. http://www.piast.pan.pl/en/news/413-16-new-piast-fellows