Ioana Zamfir

Dissertation Title

Queer Body Politics in Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine: Reconsidering Identity Formation and Post-Soviet Transition

Supervisor: Zbig Wojnowski and Kate Lebow

Research Interests and Dissertation Topic

For the past five years, I have focused on queer history in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. I researched queer lived experiences in the nineties in Romania, for which, I conducted fieldwork at the Adrian Newell Paun Queer Archives, Romania’s only queer archives. My study, “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.

My research interests encompass Soviet history, queer lived experiences in the former Soviet space, and identity formation. I examine 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.

My master’s research centred on queer life in Belarus through first-hand accounts obtained from private archives and interviews. My 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. My scholarship aims to revise the narrative that queer history is homogenous across the former Soviet Union and defined solely by communist repression. I am grateful to the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and the Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme in the Humanities for providing me with the opportunity to advance my research at Oxford and shed light on silenced narratives.

Academic Background

I grew up in Montreal and completed my undergraduate degree in History and International Development at McGill University in 2021. Wanting to learn Russian and holding a deep-seated interest in Soviet and post-Soviet history, I moved to Belarus for a year, where I taught English and French at a foreign languages school until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

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