Roland Clark | Department of History | University of Pittsburgh

Advisor: Irina Livezeanu
Doctoral Thesis: European Fascists and Local Activists: Romania's Legion of the Archangel Michael
Date of PhD: 2012
Current Position: Lecturer in Modern European History, University of Liverpool

After spending seven years at Pitt studying the intellectual and social history of interwar Romania, I now teach modern European history at the University of Liverpool. Outside of the university I blog regularly and am Secretary of the Society for Romanian Studies.

I published my first book in 2015, entitled Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania. It also came out in a Romanian translation a couple of months after the English edition appeared. I'm now working on a couple of projects studying lived religion in modern Romania as well as investigating antisemitic student movements across East-Central Europe during the 1920s.

I’m constantly surprised by which things I learned at Pitt are the most valuable in the workplace. After deeply resenting the enormous scope of my Comprehensive Exams, I now find that the reading I did for them is invaluable when I am designing new courses on places and times that I am not a specialist on. Specific seminars at Pitt have also become courses of their own. Much of what I learned from John Markoff about Social Movements fed into a European Social Movements course I created, and studying Soviet Russia with William Chase let me design my own course on Revolutionary Russia, 1825-1938. Meanwhile, in a job where I have to write lectures at a moment’s notice, learning to write short papers to strict deadlines as a grad student is a skill that is absolutely crucial for my current job.