Cristina Vatulescu received her Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Harvard in 2005 and came to NYU after a year as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her first book, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and The Secret Police, a study of the relationships between cultural and policing practices in twentieth century Eastern Europe, was published by Stanford University Press. Taking advantage of the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania, Police Aesthetics focuses on their most infamous holdings—the personal files—as well as on the agency’s less known involvement with cinema. Two articles stemming from this project, “Arresting Biographies: The Secret Police File in The Soviet Union and Romania,” and “Politics of Estrangement: Tracking Shklovsky’s Device in Literary and Policing Practices” have been published in Comparative Literature andPoetics Today. Vatulescu’s current project is a crosscultural exploration of the interplay of documents and fictions in twentieth century cinema, literature, as well as in legal texts and practices. A first installment of this project, titled “‘The Face to Face Encounter of Art and Law:’ Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up,” was published in Law and Literature.

Contact

Email: cristina.vatulescu@nyu.edu

Articles by Cristina Vatulescu