Annual and Adjunct Faculty

Nachescu, Voichita Ileana

  • Portrait
  • Assistant Teaching Professor
  • Email: vn122@rutgers.edu
  • Office: 162 Ryders Lane, Room 209
  • Research Interests: Histories of activism, African American women’s intellectual history, critical race theory, transnational feminism with a focus on Eastern Europe.
  • Education: Ph.D., Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, University at Buffalo
  • Webpage: https://ileananachescu.com/

 

 

 

 

Biographical Notes

Ileana V. Nachescu is a scholar of intersectional and transnational feminism. She co-founded the first Women’s Studies Center at her alma mater, the University of the West, Timisoara, Romania. Her monograph titled “Where Feminism Is a Dimension of Humanism”: The National Alliance of Black Feminists (1974-1983), currently under review, centers the history of the women’s liberation movement on the experiences of Midwestern African American feminists.

An award-winning educator, Ileana Nachescu received a Humanities Plus grant to integrate podcasts into feminist pedagogy, and has presented on teaching with podcasts at several conferences. She recently revised the course WGSS 284: Feminist Knowledge Production as Write to Change the World, focusing on bringing feminist scholarship to a larger audience via podcasts and personal essays.

In her creative nonfiction, Nachescu attempts to map the fraught and shifting contours of home from an immigrant’s perspective. She is at work on a book-length project, Memoirs of a Socialist Childhood, which explores the articulations of gender, class, and race in a society of equals. Her essay “Ukraine: Beyond the Postsoviet,” published in the Boston Review, has been translated into Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, and Romanian.

Nachescu was Assistant Undergraduate Director of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from 2019 to 2022. She is currently serving on the Executive Council of the New Brunswick chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT and on the editorial board of the journal Rejoinder. She is a founding member of the RU Podcast Collective.

Awards, Fellowships & Grants

Research Council Grant, Rutgers University (2020)
Humanities Plus Grant, Rutgers University (2019)
Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University (2006-2008)
Excellence in Teaching Award, University at Buffalo (2004)
Doctoral Support Grant, Open Society Institute (2003)

Selected Publications

Nachescu, Ileana. “‘The Kind of World We Wanted to Be In’: Protocol Feminism and Participatory Democracy in Intersectional Consciousness-Raising Groups.” Forthcoming in Feeling Democracy, eds. Arlene Stein and Sarah Tobias (Rutgers University Press).

Nachescu, Ileana. “Ukraine: Beyond the Postsoviet.” Boston Review, March 4, 2022. https://bostonreview.net/articles/ukraine-beyond-the-postsoviet/.

Nachescu, Ileana. “Where Feminism Is a Dimension of Humanism”: The National Alliance of Black Feminists (1974-1983). Book manuscript under review.

Nachescu, Ileana. “Censoring Anglogynophobia: Reconsidering the Disappearance of the National Alliance of Black Feminists.” Feminist Studies 47, no. 1 (2021): 201-229. https://doi.org/10.15767/feministstudies.47.1.0201

Nachescu, Ileana. “‘The Kind of World We Wanted to Be In’: Protocol Feminism and Participatory Democracy in Intersectional Consciousness-Raising Groups.” Forthcoming in Feeling Democracy, eds. Arlene Stein and Sarah Tobias (Rutgers University Press).

Nachescu, Ileana. “Walks in the Park: On the Foreignness of the Socialist Past.” Boston Review, December 20, 2019. http://bostonreview.net/arts-in-society/ileana-nachescu-walks-park-socialism-romania.