Gabriel Marin has been teaching at the University of Ottawa in French and English since 2006. In 2004, he finished a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Laval, about the collective memory illnesses and Romanian school textbooks after Ceausescu’s communism. From 1992 to 2000, he studied in Romania, Russia and Hungary, questioning the mnemonic incidences of the totalitarian regimes on the historical condition of Eastern Europeans.
After his PhD, as “researcher-practitioner”, Gabriel Marin traveled to Canada and the United States with immigrant truck-drivers having fled communist Eastern Europe. In 2005, he proposed a postdoctoral project on scattered memories of the communist Gulag and he attempts to recompose them from an immigrant journeyman to another, from a passeur to another, from a truck-driver to another, by word of mouth, in the middle of the Texas desert or between two snowstorms in the Canadian North.
Now Gabriel Marin is interested in exploring the immigrants’ nostalgias, approaching taxi-drivers, shaorma seller or simply the anonymous immigrant worker of the Canadian or North-American labour market. A website dedicated to this mnemonic migratoriamedium is currently under construction.
University degrees
2007-2005 ― Postdoctoral Fellow, Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture) – Carleton University
2004-2000 ― Ph.D., History, University of Laval
2000 ― MA, École doctorale en Science Sociale, Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie
1992-1999 ― BA, MA University of Bucharest, Budapest Eötvös Loránd University and Moscow Pedagogical State University
Fields of interest
- Intellectual History, Collective Memory, Historiography, Pedagogy and History Education, Ethnicity and Nationalism, Immigration Studies
- Eastern European and Russian History, Communism and Post-communism, the European Union Enlargement
- Oral History, Globalisation and Labour Market Studies, Immigrant stories and Nostalgia
Ongoing research
Migratoria Medium : Monologues of multiplicity, immigrant narratives in the age of postmodernism; See:www.uottawa.ca/migratoria.narratives (provisional)
Encounters of Memories : Eastern European Nostalgia in Canada
Courses taught
- HIS4760 – Ethnic Profession in Canada Labor Market – Winter 2008
- HIS3330 – The history of the Balkans: From Dracula’s crusades to Kosovo Independence – Fall 2007
- HIS 2117 – The History of URSS – Winter 2007
- HIS 2516 – Modern Russia and Romanov’s Dynasty – Fall 2006
- POL 3142 – Western European Politics – Fall 2006
Selected publications
Books
Book: Marin, Gabriel (2008) La leçon d’histoire. Les nostalgies du communisme et les manuels d’histoire des Roumains, Paris, France (in press).
Marin, Gabriel (2007), Encounters of Memories. The representations of identity for two generations of Eastern European, Canadian Ethnic Journal (upcoming); For an Internet version see “Cultural production and citizenship in the context of Transnationality”: the Eastern-Europeans Festivals; Toronto, Metropolis, Canada.
Marin, Gabriel (2007): “Once upon a time in the East… ‘History without Memory’, ‘Memory without History’…”, in Historia, Pamiec u Tozsamosc (History, Memory and Identity), Wydawnictwo Naukowe Instytutu Historii UAM, Poznań, Poland, Maria Kujawska et Christine Lawrence (ed.).
Marin, Gabriel (2004) : « Comment construire en Roumanie une identité nationale et européenne? Les nouveaux manuels d’histoire des Roumains », Revue d’Études Comparatives Est-Ouest (RECEO), Paris, France, 2004, vol. 35, No.3, pp.5-38.
Many papers have been published in Canada in the Canadian-Romanian community press or in Romania. The last article is entitled: “‘Neneaca…’, My Brother Immigrant”, Reper Romanesc (Repère Roumain), Romanian Journal in Quebec City, 44, April 2008.
Latest papers in the Romanian Press:
Gabriel Marin 