Liana Popa, BA BA MA

Doctoral researcher in the project "Forging Wartime Biopolitics: Militarized Refugees’ Bodies and Environments in WWI Eastern Europe"

Contact

Mail: liana.popa@univie.ac.at 

Curriculum Vitae and list of publications

Liana Popa is a gender historian, specializing in Romanian History of the 20th century. Between 2022 and 2025, she was active in numerous internal and external academic research projects at the Institute of Contemporary History, University of Vienna, i.e. as a student research assistant in the ERC-projects GLORE and HERESSEE.
From 2024 to 2025, she was involved in the exhibition "Controlled Freedom. The Allied Forces in Vienna" at the Wien Museum in Vienna, conducting her own scientific research project on Allied cultural policy through art exhibitions during the occupation period, which was funded by Stadt Wien Kultur.
Liana Popa received several funding grants and carried out three archival and field research trips to Romania for her master's thesis on abortion-related maternal mortality in Romania's Ceaușescu regime. Her master's thesis won the "GAIN Gender & Agency"–Prize in 2025.
After completing her master's degree with honors in June 2025, she worked as a free historian and participated in several historical exhibition projects in Vienna and beyond.
For her dissertation, she is researching aspects of gender, body and environment within the context of refugeedom in Romania during World War I. A first hypothesis of her project is the perspective and experience of refugeedom as an additional, or fourth, burden for Romanian women behind the backdrop of WWI and the militarized environment during this period.