Aurelia Cojocaru received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley (2022) with an additional certification in Critical Theory. She holds an MA in English with a Creative Emphasis (UC Berkeley, 2019) and a BA in Humanities from Bard College Berlin. She has taught courses on topics including immigrant literature, science and literature, and creative writing. Her poetry appears widely in journals in Romania and Moldova and has been translated into several languages; her poetry collection, Du-te free (pen-name Aura Maru, Editura Cartier) was published in 2015 and received the Writers Union Debut Prize and the Government Youth Award in Moldova.
She is currently at work on her monograph, The Quest for Method in Early Twentieth-Century Poetics, which investigates the intellectual and aesthetic problem of method in Russian and Anglo-American modernisms. Analyzing the period through the vantage point of method revises critical assumptions about modernist literature emulating or appropriating scientific concepts in a derivative way. Instead, her research demonstrates the historical heterogeneity of the idea of “literary method,” a concept that remains both omnipresent and surprisingly undertheorized in our scholarly discourse today.
A forthcoming essay investigates the link between Andrei Bely’s concept of “symbolism as a method” and his longstanding literary use of geometry. In parallel, she is embarking on a second project, on contemporary Eastern European as well as American immigrant literature. In an invited contribution, she analyzes the resurgence of Russian-language traces in contemporary Romanian literature from Moldova.