Affiliation: University of Bucharest
Keywords: Early modern philosophy, aesthetics, Holocaust studies, biopolitics, philosophy of culture
Full profile: Oana Serban teaches Modern Philosophy, Aesthetics, Biopolitics and Cultural Studies at the University of Bucharest, Romania, as titular professor of the Faculty of Philosophy and the UNESCO Chair in Interculturality, Good Governance and Sustainable Development. She is the Executive Director of CCIIF – The Research Center for the History of Philosophical Ideas (UB). She has authored Cultural capital and creative communication. (Anti)Modern and (Non)Eurocentric Perspectives (Routledge, 2023), After Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions (De Gruyter, 2022), Artistic Capitalism (Paralela 45, 2016; Cartea Românească Educațional 2025), and co-edited different volumes of philosophy, culture and aesthetics, from which the most recent are Rethinking Modernity, Transitions and Challenges (Cambridge, Ethics International Press), Bordering the European Identity (Bucharest University Press 2018), Octavio Paz: Culture and Modernity (Bucharest University Press, 2017), Culture and Religion in the Balkans. Philosophical Approaches (Bucharest University Press, 2015).
Currently, she is interested in the biopolitical potential of modern art, explored in one of her latest studies, published in the volume Philosophy and Film: Bridging Divides (ed. Christina Rawls, Diana Neiva, Steven Gouveia) (Routledge, 2019), and continued in her capacity as director of a research project on Biopolitical Art in the Post-Holocaust Time. Forthcoming volumes at Edinburgh University Press and Suny Press include her latest studies on biopolitical art and Italian biopolitics. She teaches Holocaust studies framed as a biopolitical history of antisemitism and antihumanism. In this field, she is interested in topics such as the impardonable and limits of forgiveness, the origins of totalitarianism, hospitality and hostility in the 20th century, the aestheticization of violence, cultural memory and remembrance. Oana Șerban has translated different authors such as Gilles Lipovetsky, Michel Foucault, Sylvain Tesson and Jean d’Ormesson.