Daniela DUMBRAVA

My educational background, spanning environments as diverse as the Romanian, Italian, American and British ones, has provided me with the opportunity to experience and assimilate the benefits and downsides of various approaches to the methodology of research and teaching: for example, in Romania, quantitative methods (in both humanistic and the social sciences) took center stage; Italians employ comparative historical and philological methods as the best approach; lastly, in the Anglo-American context, I found an interesting mixture between the quantitative and comparative approach. The latter is arguably the environment most conducive to the best of results in both the teaching and research of early modern history - e.g.  geographic history, history of early modern and Renaissance maps of Asia, international relations between Russia and China – which is fundamentally interdisciplinary in nature. Through my in-depth experience of such diversity of academic contexts, I have come to appreciate that interdisciplinarity yields the best results only when combined with the strictest rigor, and this is a principle that has guided my academic career ever since. Furthermore, through participating in conferences and other academic events in these environments, and through extensive interactions with scholars with equally various backgrounds, I learned to tailor the findings of my research to the needs of my audience.
Supervisors: Nicola Di Cosmo, Institute for Advanced Study, and Princeton