We are happy to announce the first mentor of the 2025 UCSIA Summer School: Meet Vlad Naumescu!
Dr. Naumescu is no stranger to the UCSIA Summer School. He first contributed as a guest expert during the 2023 thematic workshop that shaped the current three-year cycle, continued in 2024 as a lecturer, and will be returning this year!
Vlad Naumescu is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the Central European University. He is an anthropologist of religion with broad interdisciplinary expertise and visual practice. His work spans several fields, including religion and secularism, learning and cultural transmission and visual anthropology.
Dr. Naumescu’s research focuses on the transformation of global Orthodoxy from a historical-comparative perspective. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Eastern Europe and South India, exploring religious change in postsocialist Ukraine (2007), competing moralities in (post)socialist Romania (2016) pedagogies of prayer in South India (2019), Orthodox theopolitics (2020) and religious orthodoxies (2022). He is currently conducting fieldwork on religious disputes in secular courts in South India, looking at the transmutation of religious rites into rights in the indigenous Malankara church.
Dr. Naumescu is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker (Birds’ Way, Bread of Life: The Word/Silence) and has led international summer schools and documentary film workshops for many years.
His expertise in religious-secular frictions, theopolitics, and moral traditions makes him particularly well-suited to this year’s theme: Competing Values, Shifting Norms: Questioning the Intersection of Religion and Politics through Moral Debates. His work sheds light on the entanglement of politics and religion in contemporary societies, offering valuable insights into current discussions on faith, authority, and moral contestation.