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Professor Romantan leaves us with a rich legacy of rigorous, imaginative, and critical research and publication. During her brief time at UMass Amherst, she was engaged in new research on the fraught political culture of European globalization. Her last publications focused on the dark side of civil society and the use of new media by both Far Right and mainstream conservative organizations to mobilize nationalist identity in Romania and across southern Europe. Professor Romantan was also a scholar of transnational “cultures of protest” around environmental, labor, and social rights and the increasingly precarious plight of migrants in Europe and the United States. Her earlier work had explored risk and neoliberal governance, from the aviation industry to global public health. Professor Romantan’s proficiency in multiple languages, her deep commitment to complex social theories, and her passionate advocacy of empirical research was reflected in both the breadth of her interests and the care with which she advised graduate students on developing their own research. As a scholar fluent in qualitative and quantitative methods, Professor Romantan believed firmly in international fieldwork of many kinds to support engaged scholarship.

The $1,000 competitive grant will be awarded to a graduate student in the Department of Communication whose primary dissertation research site is outside the United States. The grant will provide support for the student’s travel, living, and/or research expenses, and will be awarded based on the strength of the applicant’s academic performance and grant proposal.

This grant is open to all ABD doctoral candidates in the Department of Communication whose research requires international travel. Interested students should submit a current CV and a research proposal to Kathy Ready and cc the GPD by April 12, 2017. The GPD will forward all nominations to the Grad Studies Committee, who will select this year’s awardee by April 26. For more details on the proposal, please see below.

Selection Criteria:

  • The applicant has successfully defended the dissertation prospectus for which he/she seeks funding.
  • The purpose and importance of travel and activities to be conducted outside the United States are clearly described.
  • The applicant demonstrates background preparation, language skills, and methodological skills for the proposed research.
  • The intellectual merit and innovation of the proposed research are clear.
  • The applicant will depart for international travel no later than January 30th, 2018.

Required Application Materials:

  • An up-to-date curriculum vitae
  • An application of no more than 1,250 words, double-spaced, including the following: a summary of your research proposal and its anticipated outcomes and contributions; a description of the project’s research design and the role of international research within it; a detailed description of the research you will conduct outside the United States, including advance preparation you have done or will do; an anticipated travel schedule; an itemized budget to which the $1,000 award will be applied
  • A letter of support from your advisor

Those who have previously received the award may apply, but first time applicants will be prioritized.

Anca Romantan (1975-2008)

To donate to the Anca Romantan International Research Award, please click here.

In memory of Prof. Anca Romantan, a scholar committed to international research in the field of Communication, the Department of Communication at UMass Amherst is proud to support graduate students' international research with an annual award in her honor.

Prof. Romantan leaves us with a rich legacy of rigorous, imaginative, and critical research and publication. During her brief time at UMass Amherst, she was engaged in new research on the political culture of European globalization. Her last publications focused on the dark side of civil society and the use of new media by both far right and mainstream conservative organizations to mobilize nationalist identity in Romania and across southern Europe. Prof. Romantan was also a scholar of transnational “cultures of protest” around environmental, labor, and social rights and the plight of migrants in Europe and the United States. Her earlier work at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania explored risk, neoliberal governance, and public opinion from the aviation industry to global public health. Prof. Romantan’s proficiency in multiple languages, her deep commitment to complex social theories, and her passionate advocacy of empirical research were reflected in both the breadth of her interests and the care with which she advised graduate students. As a scholar fluent in qualitative and quantitative methods, Prof. Romantan believed firmly in international fieldwork of many kinds to support engaged scholarship.

The $1,000 competitive grant is awarded to a graduate student in the Communication department whose primary dissertation research site is outside the United States. The grant supports the student’s travel, living, and/or research expenses and is awarded based on the strength of the applicant’s academic performance and grant proposal.

We are honored as a department to offer this grant thanks to the generosity of Cornel Ban, Anca Romantan’s partner, and many other donors who have supported the fund in her memory.

Previous Romantan Award Winners:

2023: Lizhen Zhao
Lizhen's dissertation will ethnographically examine rural Chinese women’s lived experiences with platform labor. How do rural Chinese women experience e-commerce platform-mediated and -based digital labor? How are these experiences structured by an assemblage of factors, including platform-state power, technological infrastructures, Confucian patriarchy, local labor history, and institutionalized urban-rural inequality? What kind of gendered subjectivities are constituted in these experiences? And what practices and possibilities for resistance and solidarity emerge from such experiences? During the summer of 2023, Lizhen conducted pilot fieldwork in Gansu Province in the northwestern region of China. 

2023: Cecilia Zhou
Cecilia's dissertation focuses on exploring online opportunities (e.g., learning, socialization, identity construction) and risks (e.g., cyberbullying, privacy breach, mental and physical health problems) brought about by internet use among urban middle-class Chinese adolescents and how these online opportunities and risks are shaped by parenting and parental mediation in contemporary Chinese middle-class families. During the summer of 2023, she flew to China to do interviews with adolescents on their perspectives and developed a survey that was modified based on the interview results. She is conducting quantitative survey research with Chinese adolescents in spring 2024.

2022: Alkim Yalin Karakilic
Alkim’s research is focused on the integration of e-commerce and influencer culture to understand the shifting relations of gender and labor under global platform capitalism. During Summer 2022, they plan to interview Turkish content creators about affiliate work to understand how e-commerce platforms shape digital labor, as well as creators’ increasing experiences of precarity and platform-dependency. This research project aims to de-Westernize scholarship on digital media and influencer cultures by providing insights from Turkey and its leading e-commerce platform, Trendyol, which significantly owes its rampant growth to influencer marketing strategies.

2019: Anton Dinerstein
The Anca Romantan research grant allowed Anton to do ethnographic fieldwork for a dissertation which investigated how social change and cultural transformation unfolds in Belarus and how the ideas about shared activities, relationships, and identities which accompany this process are enacted, negotiated, and maintained through everyday interactions. As a result, Anton was able to show how culture is transformed via public creative endeavors in modern-day Belarus. He was also able to show how public creative practices, like urban festivals, create the conditions for social and cultural change—not necessarily the changes in a political regime, but rather lead the process of creation and adaptation of new social and cultural forms and practices as a part of common everyday life, no matter what the regime is, as public creativity, in the first place, underlies the process of creating shared social spaces and unity as a response to the challenges of everyday life.

2018: Danbi Yoo
Danbi Yoo’s dissertation focuses on "civic tech," the global phenomenon of tech-based voluntary action of citizens emerging with the culture of openness and initiatives of open government data. Combining critical data studies with the studies of digital citizenship, her dissertation examines how digital technologies and data intervene in the way people form their civic identities and act as citizens. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork (2017–19) with civic tech groups for civic hacking, data activism, and platform cooperativism in Seoul, South Korea, this research shows how grassroots civic hackers in Korea reconfigure the global hegemonic discourses of civic tech and practice more equitable and decentralized forms of civic participation. 

2017–18: Eren Odabasi
Eren Odabasi’s dissertation project explored the relationship between European film festivals and funding initiatives for feature film production. He used the Anca Romantan award to attend the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, where he interviewed multiple filmmakers whose projects had received financial support from the Berlin International Film Festival’s World Cinema Fund before premiering at Cannes. His research also included an ethnographic account of various audience groups in the festival and the organizational structures of the event. This project led to the publication of a chapter in International Film Festivals: Contemporary Cultures and History Beyond Venice and Cannes (ed. Tricia Jenkins, I.B. Tauris, 2018), a peer-reviewed article in the journal Society and Leisure (2021, Vol. 44, No. 1), and an extensive festival report in the Turkish monthly film magazine Altyazi.

2016–17
Siyuan Yin
Siyuan Yin's dissertation project explores the political, social, and cultural implications of Chinese labor NGOs' media, communication, and cultural programs and projects to confront social reproduction of cultural inequalities of women migrants in contemporary China. The Anca Romantan grant will provide financial support for Siyuan's six-month field research in Beijing, China.

2015–16
Su Young Choi
Su Young Choi used the Romantan grant for field research in South Korea on the protest between the farming villagers in Miryang and the state-run Korean Electronic Power Corporation over the construction of transmission towers on their (expropriated) lands. Her research contributes to knowledge about how specific historical and political economic contexts come into play in constituting communication ecologies, especially in the South Asian context.

2014–15
Diana Coryat
Diana Coryat’s research is focused on an urban youth movement in Ecuador that opposes the extractive politics of the Ecuadorean government. Specifically, the movement has tried to stop the plans to drill for oil in the Ecuadorean Amazon, one of the most bio-diverse regions on the planet. The fellowship enabled her to travel to the Amazon to understand the relationship between the urban movement and the region.

2013–14
Dijana Jelaca
The Romantan grant aided Dr. Jelaca in covering research travel expenses to the region of the former Yugoslavia. Her dissertation was about trauma narratives in post-Yugoslav cinema, particularly as they relate to the recent inter-ethnic conflicts in the region.

2012–13
Nadezhda Sotirova
Dr. Sotirova’s dissertation research included a six-month field trip to Bulgaria for her doctoral research. Her goal was to understand oplakvane, a particular Bulgarian way or style of speaking that is most comparable to “complaining” in the United States, but is colored by its particular cultural ethos.

2011–12
Elena V. Nuciforo
Dr. Nuciforo used the Anca Romantan award to do fieldwork in Russia, where she collected ethnographic data. Her doctoral research explored Russian people's communication concerning alcohol consumption. The study offers a new way to look at what is considered to be a dire public health issue in Russia.

2010–11
Liliya Karimova
Dr. Karimova used the Romantan grant to complete the final stage of her dissertation data collection in Kazan, Tatarstan. In her ethnographic research, she investigated the rise of Muslim piety among Tatar women in the central Russian republic of Tatarstan and the role piety stories—narratives about becoming practicing Muslims—played in their personal and social transformation.

How to Donate:

To make a tax-deductible donation to the Anca Romantan International Research Award via the university's secure website, please click here. If you would prefer to make your donation by check, please make the check out to the "University of Massachusetts Amherst" and note in the memo that the donation is for the Anca Romantan International Research Award. Please send it to:

Jessica Dizek, Associate Director of Development
College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Draper Hall
40 Campus Center Way
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, MA 01003-9274
USA