Dr. Andrea Virginás

Dr. Andrea Virginás
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
About me
The starting date of the AGE-C project, February 2023, coincided with my beginning as an associate professor and researcher at the Theatre and Film Faculty of Babeș-Bolyai University (BBU) Cluj-Napoca, Romania’s representative public higher education institution. Previously I was an assistant, and associate professor in the Media Department of Sapientia The Hungarian University of Transylvania, a private institution funded by the Hungarian state. I have been working as an editor, film critic and essayist for various Hungarian-language publications since my highschool years, and my educational credentials – BA in Hungarian and English Studies (BBU), MA in Literary and Cultural Theory (BBU), MA in Gender Studies (Central European University, University of the State of New York), PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies (Debrecen University, Hungary) – helped me in advancing with my research defined by the keywords cultural canons, genre formations, gendered aspects and mediation processes. I was visiting professor for Erasmus mobilities or semester-long courses at universities in Hungary (ELTE, SZFE, MOME, Károli Gáspár), Ireland (Dundalk Institute of Technology), and Sweden (Linnaeus University). The most important research projects to which I contributed: European Virtual Academy (European Commission, Erasmus LLP, 2011-2012, member); The Role of Generic Panels in European Small Cinemas (Romanian Research Agency, 2013-2015, leader); Female creators in East-European film industries: examples from Transylvania/Romania, Slovakia and Hungary (Domus/Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2016-2017, leader); Cine-versity (Creative Europe, MEDIA/EACEA, 2017-2018); Reinterpreting intermediality in contemporary film: changing forms of liminality (Romanian Research Agency, 2017-2019); Hungarian photography and moving image art in Transylvania on the verge between the analogue and the digital eras (Sapientia University Research Institute, 2019-2021, leader); Cultural Traumas in Contemporary European Small National Cinemas (Romanian Research Agency, 2022-2024, leader). I am a Bolyai János Research Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for the period 2021-2024.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrea-Virginas
Contact
andrea.virginas[at]ubbcluj.ro
Research interests
Film genres, cultural canons, star formations, production cultures; narratology, media theory, eco theory; small cinemas, mainstream cinemas, Anglophone, Francophone, European, East European
Publications
Film Genres in Hungarian and Romanian Cinema: History, Theory, Reception. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield.
Between transnational and local in European cinema: regional resemblances in Hungarian and Romanian films. In: Laura Canning, Ingrid Lewis (ed.): European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Discourses, Directions, and Genres. Palgrave Macmillan, 167–185.
Traces of genre in New Romanian Cinema: a narrow path for a small entity? In Christina Stojanova (ed.), The New Romanian Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 180–193.
Kollektív emlékeink a mobilitásról: a női alakoktól a női alkotókig Magyar gyártási kontextusban [Our collective memories of mobility: from female characters to female creators in Hungarian production contexts] (together with Emese Bíró, Mária Botházi, Réka Kassay). In Győri Zsolt and Kalmár György (eds.), Nemi és etnikai terek viszonyai a magyar filmben [Relations between space, gender and ethnicity in Hungarian cinema]. Debrecen: Debreceni Egyetemi Kiadó, 45–58.
Embodied memories of geographical and social mobility: White-collar women in postcommunist films about Romania. Journal of European Studies 2018, Vol. 48(3-4), 278–294.
The ’Hollywood factor’ in the most popular Hungarian films of the period 1996–2014: when a small post-communist cinema meets a mainstream one. In Dorota Ostrowska, Francesco Pitassio, Zsuzsanna Varga (eds.), Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe: Film Cultures and Histories. I.B. Tauris, 263–281. Gendered transmediation of the digital from S1m0ne to Ex Machina: ‘visual pleasure’ reloaded? European Journal of English Studies Vol. 21 2017, issue 3, 288–303.
Andrea Virginás (ed.), Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of Eastern European Cinema: Spaces, Bodies, Memories. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Female stardom in contemporary Romanian New Wave cinema: Unglamour? Alphaville Journal of Film and Screen Media Issue 10, Winter, 1–20.
Female trauma in the films of Szabolcs Hajdu, David Lynch, Cristian Mungiu and Peter Strickland, Studies in Eastern European Cinema Volume 5, 2: 155–168.
Activities
Network of European Cinema and Media Studies (NECS): Steering Committee
NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies: Editorial Board
Communicazioni Sociali, Literatura y Kultura Popularna, TNTeF Társadalmi Nemek Tudománya: Advisory Board
My AGE-C story
My postdoctoral research period in the 2010s allowed me to pursue my interest in the development of film genres in small national and/or East European contexts, and the formation of melodrama also offered the terrain for analyzing female involvement in production, or feminine identities on screen. The strong maternal figures in Romanian cinema – as fictional mothers projected or as strong actresses and producers backstage – encapsulate and thus articulate numerous contradictions of our audiovisual practices and imaginaries, entering and leaving the industry as specifically gendered and aged participants being one such element. For my 2021 monograph Film Genres in Hungarian and Romanian Cinema: History, Theory, Reception I could achieve analyses of female and male trajectories in small national production contexts, pointing to interesting differences from mainstream possibilities, including that of representing film stars and fictive personas as more grounded in the everyday, including the aging, even decaying body. The wonderful possibility of joining the AGE-C project (then in the very early proposal stage) came in the spring of 2021 when I was contemplating the improbable yet strongly effective and affective performances of such aging and old East European stars as Luminița Gheorghiu, Vlad Ivanov, or Mari Törőcsik – in Child’s Pose, La Gomera or Swing and Aurora Borealis –, or indeed the magnificent career of director Márta Mészáros spanning over five decades. How to age well with cinema, television and streaming? I am most happy to contribute to this ongoing process.
