Meet Professor Marius Turda as he discusses his book In Search of the Perfect Romanian: National Specificity, Racial Degeneration, and Social Selection in Modern Romania in conversation with Professor Dan Stone. The event is presented by the Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership (HGRP).
Turda's work examines debates about Romanian national identity and race from the 1880s through the 1950s, arguing that anti-Semitism and anti-Roma racism drove the ethnic purification campaigns of the Antonescu regime in the early 1940s. The book traces how eugenic thinking shaped the Holocaust in Romania and how the ideal of the "perfect" Romanian persisted into communist-era definitions of the "new man" and socialist society.
Marius Turda is Professor and Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University, founder of the Working Group in the History of Race and Eugenics, and director of the Centre for the History of Eugenics and Racism in Cluj-Napoca. Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of over 25 books on Holocaust history, with a new work on the Romanian Holocaust forthcoming in 2027.
