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Acknowledgments In the decade that has passed since I began work on this project, I have amassed so many institutional, intellectual, and personal debts in being able to arrive at this point that it is impossible to pay proper homage to all those who helped me along the way. ἀ e International Research and Exchanges Board helped me get started with an Individual Advanced Research grant in 1996 and 1997. Subsequently I benefited from a research grant from Fulbright-Hays between January and July 1999. A collaborative grant between the Aspera Foundation and Indiana University enabled me to conduct an oral history project related to this book in the summer of 2001 in Braşov. Indiana University also offered several travel and research grants that helped me return to Romania and also travel elsewhere (Poland, Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria) for comparative research. I owe a debt of gratitude to numerous colleagues at my home institution, who have encouraged me along the way and have read and commented on this manuscript or papers connected to it: Jeff Wasserstrom, Marissa Moorman, Mark Roseman , Padraic Kenney, John Bodnar, David Ransel, Jeff Veidlinger, Christina Zarifopol , Sarah Phillips, Sarah Knott, and others. ἀ e members of the Poynter Center seminar titled “Memory: Ethics, Politics, Aesthetics” (2007–2008) were immensely helpful in helping me frame my questions and methodological approach from a richly interdisciplinary perspective that stretched from ethics and rhetorics to law and early-modern east Asian history. A special thanks goes out to the director of our seminar, Richard Miller, who has continued, even after it ended, to offer advice. Other wonderful colleagues around the world were generous in their intellectual fellowship, helping me engage tough questions and sharpen my arguments: Mihaela Miroiu, Liviu Rotman, Andrei Pleşu, Irina Livezeanu, Radu Ioanid, Krassimira Daskalova , Maria Todorova, Chad Bryant, Melissa Bokovoy, Nancy Wingfield, Jay Winter , Mark Cornwall, Marius Turda, Keith Hitchins, Ben Frommer, Katherine Verdery, xviii Acknowledgments Doru Radosav, Meda Bârca, Mişu Gherman, Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Michael Shafir, Ştefan Ungureanu, Andrei Pippidi, Lidia Bradley, Maria Berza, Valeria Bălescu, Lucian Boia, Elena and Constantin Bărbulescu, Ioan Drăgan, Melinda Mitu, Radu Hriniuc, Valer Hossu, Sabina Ispas, Dinu Necula, Bujor Râpeanu, Virgil Mureşan, Mirela and Bogdan Murgescu, Rodica Palade, Marius Popa, Ioan Opriş, Carmen Popescu, Leon Volovici, Ilie Schipor, Pompiliu Teodor, Corina Turc, Smaranda Vultur, Vasile Crişan, Trandafir Vid, Alexandru Zub, and many others. And while I was traveling through Romania and elsewhere for research, many of these people offered me their friendship and hospitality as well. A special thanks goes to: Mom, Dad, Mary Lee, Mihaela, Adi, Elena, Doru, Oltea, Virgil, Lăcrămioara, Meda, Cleo, Tanti Vali, Rareş, and Şerban. Finally, this book would not be what it is without the thoughtful critiques it received from the Indiana University Press readers and editors . I am extremely grateful especially to Janet Rabinowitch and Candace McNulty for the detailed comments they provided for this project. My deepest gratitude goes to those close to me who put up with my absences and visits and absences again, and who gave their love and support to me even when I was being difficult. Just as with all my other projects, I couldn’t have done this one without Buni (my Romanian grandmother). Initially she was there in the background of my intellectual pursuits, ironing clothes and cooking meals, but gradually she became one of my subjects and a profound source of inspiration. Like other women in Romania from her generation (she was born in 1919), she started preparing for her funeral around the age of fifty. By the age of sixty she had acquired a veritable dowry that I used to laugh about before my family immigrated to the United States. In the time I spent with her from January 1997 until her death in April 2006, I came to understand much better the depth of this obsession as a cultural norm with which she identified as closely as many of the women I visited and spent time with from Iaşi to Cluj and villages in Maramureş. ἀ us, both in life and in her preparation to be reunited with loved ones she had long lost, Buni was a permanent reminder of the power of ritual and the profound ways in which specific religious beliefs and practices linked to death have a wide and lifelong impact on someone’s life. ἀi s book would have been a very different exercise without having had the privilege to...

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