Ioana Zamfir (Canada/Romania)

Ioana is currently reading the DPhil in History. She grew up in Montreal and completed her undergraduate degree in History and International Development at McGill University in 2021. Her desire to learn Russian and interest in Soviet and post-Soviet history led her to live in Belarus for a year, where she taught English and French at a foreign languages school until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In Fall 2022, she began her master’s at the University of Toronto’s Centre for European and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Her research has received the SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship, the Mark Gayn Graduate Scholarship, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship.

For the past five years, she has focused on queer history in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Ioana researched queer lived experiences in the nineties in Romania, for which, she conducted fieldwork at the Adrian Newell Paun Queer Archives, Romania’s only queer archives. Her research, “Between Holy Church and Holy Human Rights: Life Stories of the Romanian LGBTQ+ Community after 1989 until Romanian Accession to the European Union,” was published in the Aspasia Journal in 2023.

Her research interests encompass Soviet history, queer lived experiences in the former Soviet space, and identity formation. She examines the effects of authoritarianism, memory, trauma, and silence on individual experiences and societal structures, focusing on how identities are constructed, suppressed, or redefined under Soviet rule and in the post-Soviet period, and how LGBTQ+ identities have been marginalised or politicised in Eastern European history.

Her master’s research centred on queer life in Belarus through first-hand accounts obtained from private archives and interviews. Her doctoral study expands to include Moldova and Ukraine, analysing the differences in Soviet republics’ approaches to nonconforming sexualities and the impact of state policies on queer identity formation. Her scholarship aims to revise the narrative that queer history is homogenous across the former Soviet Union and defined solely by communist repression. She is grateful to the Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme in the Humanities for providing her with the opportunity to advance her research at Oxford and shed light on silenced narratives.