The Slavs in European History and Civilization by Professor Francis Dvornik

It starts with an investigation on the main sources of Romanian knowledge of the Baltic region and sorts out the way they have been represented in the Romanian mental images. This article analyses the beginnings, development and prospect of Baltic studies in Romania.

I will also discuss the topics of the lectures, their structure, the sources we discuss in the seminars, and the literature offered to the students for reading.

The students’ cultural and educational background is important: it is an interesting consequence of a larger cultural context and the teacher must adapt his discourse to it. My paper will discuss the cultural context for teaching Slavic history, language and cultures in today’s Romania, as well as several concrete teaching approaches I have adopted in this area. At the Faculty of History and Philosophy of the same university I have been teaching a course entitled «Slavs and Slavonism in Romanian History» since 2005.

Today, Slavic languages, cultures and literatures are taught at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj, at the Faculty of Letters. At the University of Cluj, a Chair of Slavic and South-East-European History was founded in 1919. Since then, Romanian universities have always had chairs and departments of Slavic Studies and Slavic History. It started systematically with the opening of the first chairs of «Slavic Philology» at the Bucharest and Iaşi Universities (Professors Ioan Bogdan, Ilie Bărbulescu) in 1891, respectively in 1905. On the author`s page: Abstract: The teaching of Slavic History in Romania has a tradition of over one century.

The Slavs in European History and Civilization by Professor Francis Dvornik