“Conceptualizing Forced Labor in the Context of the Holocaust: Romania and Hungary, 1940-1944.”
Professional Background
Ms. Anca Glont is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She possesses skills in Romanian, English, Hungarian, German, Italian, French, and Spanish. While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Ms. Glont conducted research on her project, “Conceptualizing Forced Labor in the Context of the Holocaust: Romania and Hungary, 1940-1944.”
Ms. Glont published the article, “Interwar Fascism and the Post-1989 Radical Right: Ideology, Opportunism, and Historical Legacy in Bulgaria and Romania,” in Historical Legacies and the Radical Right in Post-Cold War Central and Eastern Europe, Michael Minkenberg (ed.), coauthored, 2010, which also appeared in Studies in Post-Communism, 2009. Her dissertation, “Nihil Sine Carbo: Politics, Labor, and the Coal Industry in the Towns of the Jiu Valley, 1850-1977,” examines the labor force for the coal industry of the Jiu Valley. Jiu’s coal towns were forged by the tensions among coal production, workers’ own interests, and the state and companies’ definition and conception of the new, modern worker as an embodiment of successful modernization.
Fellowship Research
During her Tziporah Wiesel Fellowship she expanded on her dissertation’s exploration of the forced labor of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war in Jiu, comparatively looking at how the concepts of “labor” and “workers” were co-opted and defined within authoritarian wartime Romania and Hungary. Ms. Glont used the record collections of the Romanian Ministry of Defense, the Royal Home Defense Ministry, and the testimonies of forced laborers.
Ms. Anca Glont was in residence at the Mandel Center from February 1 to June 30, 2015.