Simina (she/her) is a Research Fellow at Queens' College at the University of Cambridge. Prior to that, she was an ESRC-funded PhD Candidate also at Cambridge. Her research sits at the intersection of the sociology of race, political sociology, critical education studies and memory studies.
Her PhD research explores the relationship between racism and collective memory, asking how understandings of the (national) past can become media of racialisation. She understands nations as hegmeonic projects which necessitate a historical commonsense for their functioning and reproduction. With Omi and Winant (2014), she conceptualises nationalism as a racial project for the racialised distribution of rights, resources, recognition and representation within the nation-state form. Empirically and more specifically, she looks at the way educational materials produce a racialised historical commonsense in Romania, and uncovers the link between nationalism and anti-Roma racism.
Together with Dr Ali Meghji, she co-founded the Catalysts for Decolonization lab at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at University of Cambridge. She teaches on eugenics, nationalism, settler colonialism and the construction of 'Europe'. Alongside her teaching and research work, she is a member of several academic communities, including the Race, Empire and Education Collective and The Politics of Representation Collective.
