Notes on Contributors
Gabriel Tiberiu Rustoiu
is an archaeologist and Director of the Alba Iulia National Museum of the Union. He holds a doctoral degree in history and has authored or co-authored over 90 archaeological reports, studies and books of history, archaeology and other related topics. His research interests concern the prehistory, the migration period and the early medieval period. He received gold and silver medals from international inventics exhibitions and is a member of the Romanian National Archaeological Commission.
Daniela Marcu Istrate
is Senior Researcher at the Romanian Academy, ‘Vasile Pârvan’ Institute of Archaeology, department of medieval archaeology. She has been working as an archaeologist and historian having the main field of research the medieval Carpathian Basin, with its churches, fortification, material and spiritual culture. She has conducted long-term excavations in Alba Iulia and extensively investigated some of the most important churches in Transylvania, as the Evangelical church in Sibiu and the Black Church in Brașov. She published over 100 studies in journals and specialized volumes and several monographs related to her fieldwork, as the ones about the churches in Alba Iulia and Sibiu. She is a member of several scientific association and editorial boards and is deeply involved in activities related to the protection of medieval heritage in Romania and abroad, as a member of national and international boards.
Florin Curta
is Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Florida. His books include Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500–1300 (Brill, 2019). He is also the editor of two collections of studies entitled East Central Europe and Eastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages (University of Michigan Press, 2005) and The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazars and Cumans (Brill, 2008). Curta is the editor of the Brill online Bibliography of the History and Archaeology of Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages and co-editor of the Brill series “East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450.” His most recent book is an economic and social history of Eastern Europe during the ‘long sixth century,’ which was published in 2021 by Brill.
Horia Ciugudean
is Senior Researcher at the Alba Iulia National Museum of the Union. He is a historian and medieval archaeologist whose research interests focus on the Bronze and Early Iron Age of the Carpathian Basin, and the Early Middle Ages in Transylvania. His fields of research include mining archaeology, landscape archaeology, and the preservation of the cultural heritage in the Transylvanian Alps. In the last decade, he has been co-director of several joint excavation projects of the Museum of Alba Iulia with Eurasien Abteilung D.A.I. Berlin, The University of Michigan and Hamilton College, in USA. He has served as Guest Lecturer at the Universities in Heidelberg, Munich, Berlin, and Budapest, and took part in several international conferences and symposia in Europe. For more than 20 years he is Senior Editor of the archaeological series Apulum. Acta Musei Apulensis, the journal of the museum in Alba Iulia. He is a member of the European Association of Archaeologists and he is Correspondent Member – Socium ab epistolis – of the Deutschen Archäologische Instituts (DAI) since 2012.
Aurel Dragotă
is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the ‘Lucian Blaga’ University of Sibiu, Faculty of Socio-Human Sciences, Department of History, Heritage and Protestant Theology. He is a medieval archaeologist whose fields and research interests are focused on the history of Early Christianity in Transylvania in the Migration Period and the early Middle Ages and its links to the South-Eastern and Central Europe in the Middle Ages.
Monica-Elena Popescu
is a Master’s Degree student at the ‘Lucian Blaga’ University of Sibiu, Faculty of Socio-Human Sciences, Department of History, Heritage and Protestant Theology. Monica-Elena Popescu specializes in the history and funeral archaeology of the Early Middle Ages.
Călin Cosma
(Ph.D. Habil.,) is first degree scientific researcher at the Institute of Archaeology and Art History in Cluj-Napoca, specialized in the history and archaeology of the Early Middle Ages. His main research topics are the study of human settlements, artifacts, cemeteries, weapons and military equipment in Transylvania during the 7th–10th centuries. He took part in archaeological excavations in Romania and abroad. He coordinated the archaeological excavations at the early medieval site from Sf. Gheorghe / Mureș County (1994–2001) and at the 10th–11th-centuries fortification from Zalău / Ortelec / Sălaj County (1997–2001), as well as at the 7th–8th-centuries cemetery from Sâncrai / Alba County (2016–2019). He has also initiated the scientific series entitled “Interferențe etnice și culturale în mileniile I a. Chr.–I p. Chr. / Ethnic and Cultural Interferences between the 1st Millennium B.C. and the 1st Millennium A.D. / Ethnische und kulturelle Interferenzen im 1. Jht. V. Chr.–1. Jht. N.Chr”, that already includes 25 volumes. Călin Cosma has also coordinated the research project entitled Warriors and Military Retainers in Transylvania of the 7th–9th Centuries, funded by the CNCSIS, 2011–2016. He was awarded the ‘Vasile Pârvan’ prize of the Romanian Academy (2004) for the book West and North-West of Romania in the 8th–10th centuries A.D.
Tudor Sălăgean
is Senior Researcher at the Transylvanian Museum of Ethnography and member of the doctoral school Population Studies and History of the Minorities of the Cluj-Napoca ‘Babeș-Bolyai’ University. Research interests are directed towards the institutional, social, and political history of medieval Transylvania in the 10th–14th centuries.
Jan Nicolae
is Professor of Homiletics, Catechesis, Hagiography and Iconography at the ‘1 Decembrie 1918’ University of Alba Iulia, Faculty of Orthodox Theology, Department of Theology, Religious Music and Sacred Art. He is a theologian interested in researching the history of preaching and Christianization missions of the peoples in the field of interference of Byzantium with the Latin West, in Hungary and in Transylvania, and in the evolution of Christianity in the Romanian provinces. He is a member of the Pontifical International Marian Academy (PAMI) in Rome and of several academic scientific associations. He has also held numerous conferences on various academic and pastoral occasions (Regensburg, Würzburg, Paris, Padua, Dublin, London).
Dan Ioan Mureșan
holds a Ph.D. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and is Assistant Professor of Medieval History at the University of Rouen Normandy, France. He specializes in ecclesiastic and imperial comparative studies. His fields of interest include Byzantine political and religious history, Mediterranean maritime history and the history of nomadic empires. He is also Member in the ‘Société des Historiens Médiévistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur Public’, the ‘Comité français des études byzantines’ and the ‘Institut des études slaves’, Paris. He edited several volumes on Byzantine and Anglo-Norman history and authored studies on various topics of medieval history.
Alexandru Madgearu
is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Political Studies of Defense and Military History, Bucharest, specialized in late ancient and medieval history. His fields of interest include the political and military history and archaeology of the South-East European region, the ancient and medieval Church history. Member in the Romanian Commission of Military History and in the committee of the Romanian Society for Byzantine Studies. He has been awarded the Fulbright post-doctoral scholarship in 2002, and the prize ‘Dimitre Onciul’ of the Romanian Academy in 2016. He is the author of two monographs published in this series (volumes 22 and 41).
Gábor Thoroczkay
holds an MA in History and Latin from ‘Eötvös Loránd’ University (1994, 1995) under the supervision of Professor József Gerics and Professor János Bollók. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in medieval history at the University of Szeged under the supervision of Professor Gyula Kristó (2004). He obtained his habilitation at Eötvös Loránd University (2014). He is currently an Associate Professor with Habilitation at the Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities, Institute of History, Department of Medieval History, Budapest. His main fields of scientific interest are Hungarian history in the Árpádian period and Hungarian prehistory.
Éva Révész
is an historian and researcher at the University of Szeged. Her fields of research are early medieval Hungarian church history, in particular the role of the Eastern Christianity in the Christianization of the Hungarians, and the Bulgarian-Byzantine-Hungarian relations, furthermore the modern age missions order, the ‘verbitas’ (SVD) history in the Hungarian province.
Boris Stojkovski
Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of History, is a medieval historian whose interests and fields of research include the history of Srem and nowadays Vojvodina in the Middle Ages, Byzantine history, church history, history of medieval Mediterranean, Arab and Ottoman history and its ties with South-Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, Byzantine-Hungarian relations and Serbian-Hungarian relations. He is a member of several international scientific associations, and has been awarded ‘Domus Hungarica’ scholarship by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences nine times. He was guest lecturer at Universities in Pisa, Budapest and Olomouc.
Șerban Turcuș
is Prof. Dr. Habil. at the Department of Medieval History of the ‘Babeș-Bolyai’ University in Cluj-Napoca. He specializes in medieval history, auxiliary sciences of history, church history. He was a fellow of the Romanian government at the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano and Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (1995–1996). Between 2002–2006 he was deputy head of mission at the Romanian Embassy to the Holy See. He was a visiting professor at the Italian-German Institute in Trento (2001) and at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan (2007, 2011). He has presented papers and attended conferences in Rome, Milan, Naples, Padua, Pisa, Trento, Trieste, Venice, Clairvaux, Paris, Troyes. He is the chairman of the Transylvanian Commission on Heraldry, Sigillography and Genealogy.
Adinel C. Dincă
(Ph.D. Habil.,) is Associate Professor at the Faculty of History and Philosophy, ‘Babeș-Bolyai’ University, and director of the research group TRANS.SCRIPT – The Centre for Diplomatic and Medieval Documentary Palaeography. Author of over 70 scholarly texts (critical editions, monographs, studies, articles, translations, and exhibition catalogues) on medieval Transylvanian literacy and church history with a special focus on Transylvanian Saxons. He is associate editor of three Romanian scientific publications and member of a series of scientific associations. Areas of expertise: Latin palaeography and literate communication, history of the medieval church, pre-modern foundations of the Transylvanian Saxons’ cultural identity.
Mihai Kovács
is currently a Ph.D. Student at the Romanian Academy Cluj-Napoca with a thesis project concerning the Transylvanian bishopric in the early 16th century; he is also a documentarian at TRANS.SCRIPT – The Centre for Diplomatic and Medieval Documentary Palaeography. Author of several papers involving the bishopric in Transylvania from the late 13th to the early 16th century. Areas of interest: medieval church history.
Nicolae Călin Chifăr
Architect, Cluj-Napoca, is a Ph.D. Student at the University of Architecture and Urbanism Ion Mincu – Bucharest under the supervision of prof. dr. arch. Augustin Ioan. His interests and fields of research include Byzantine church architecture, Byzantine art and theology, regarded as a main source and support for contemporary church architecture. He runs an architectural studio, whose projects are focused on ecclesiastical and residential buildings and the way of interacting into an unitary complex. The use of material elements engaging all the senses to draw personal experiences is part of the architectural discourse.
Marius Mihail Păsculescu
Architect, is a Ph.D. Student at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning from Cluj-Napoca under the supervision of prof. dr. arch. Virgil Pop. Associate assistant of architectural history and architectural design at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, Department of Architecture. He is a Ph.D. Student whose interests and fields of research include the architectural history of Transylvania from the Middle Ages to the Baroque Era, medieval church transformations, and monasteries in urban fabrics, with an emphasis on Counter-Reformation ecclesiastical architecture in Transylvania.
Ana Dumitran
(Ph.D.,) is a Museologist at the Alba Iulia National Museum of the Union. Her fields of research are medieval and modern Transylvanian Romanian church and art history. One of her books, dedicated to the miraculous icons of the Theotokos in Transylvania, was awarded the ‘George Oprescu’ prize by the Romanian Academy.