Monica Vasile is an environmental anthropologist. She is currently writing her first monograph The Forest Never Ends: Timbermen, Fiefdoms and Bison in the Postsocialist Carpathian Mountains. She has conducted research in the mountainous regions of Romania and is concerned with issues of human-forest relationship, grazing, rewilding, animal reintroductions, and animal histories more broadly. Monica studied and taught sociology and social anthropology at the University of Bucharest, where she obtained her PhD in 2008. She was a postdoctoral researcher for three years at the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle-Saale. Recently she was also head of the research group "Romanian Mountain Commons" at the Romanian Academy of Sciences. In addition to her academic pursuits, Monica worked as a socioeconomic expert for NGO-led nature conservation projects in Romania, which have had direct implications for the lives of Carpathian communities. As a fellow at the RCC, she taught the course "Introduction to Environmental Anthropology" for the Environmental Studies Certificate Program.
RCC Research Project: Rewilding the Carpathians: Bison Reintroduction, Environmentalism and New Forests
Selected Publications:
- "Fiefdom Forests: Authoritarianism, Labor Vulnerability and the Limits of Resistance in the Carpathian Mountains." Geoforum 106, no. 11 (2019): 155–166.
- "Formalizing Commons, Registering Rights: The Making of the Forest and Pasture Commons in the Romanian Carpathians from the 19th Century to Post-Socialism." International Journal of the Commons 12, no. 1 (2018): 170–201.
- "The Vulnerable Bison: Practices and Meanings of Rewilding in the Romanian Carpathians." Conservation and Society 16, no. 3 (2018): 217–231.
- "The Enlivenment of Institutions: Emotional Work and the Emergence of Contemporary Land Commons in the Carpathian Mountains." Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 62, no. 1 (2019).
- with Nicole Bauer and Maria Mondini. "The Attitudes towards Nature, Wilderness and Protected Areas: A Way to Sustainable Stewardship in the South-Western Carpathians." Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 61, no. 5–6 (2017): 857–877.