Stephan Nitu (Romania)
My history education at school started with ancient history…and I sort of got stuck there. Learning about civilisations so remote yet so relevant to our own present was simply the coolest thing to do in my opinion at the time. When that refused to change as I grew up, I pursued an Ancient History BA at UCL, graduating with the Faculty Medal in 2018. My thesis investigated ‘competitive altruism’, a sociological phenomenon wherein wealthy Athenians lavishly performed public services not out of generosity, but as part of an intra-elite competition to be the most altruistic agent, translating symbolic rewards into political influence. Competitive altruism inadvertently precipitated the beginnings of Athenian democracy, as the losing elites in the game aimed to undercut their peers by shifting fickle individual benefactions towards stable state payments.
My interest in concepts and methodology—often via interdisciplinary routes—deepened during my Oxford MPhil, as I examined the Athenians' perception of their own history after losing independence towards the end of the 4th century BC, with history being constantly renegotiated through the filters of memory, cognitive dissonance, and rhetoric. In a similar fashion my Oxford DPhil project extends the same approach to the Athenian economy. While a new paradigm in scholarship extols Athens' economic efflorescence, ancient economic history is in fact riddled with quantitative and cognitive fallacies, and rarely stops to consider the ontological differences between modern developmental economics and the Athenian perception of what a transaction was, or who could be considered an economic agent.
I am therefore passionate about human flourishing, defined much more broadly than in strict economic terms. Likewise, I aim to delve into the conceptual, cognitive frameworks underwriting human interaction and discourses, focusing on questions of value and salience and foregrounding big-picture skills or processes over narrow academic content wherever possible. I recently organised a conference entitled Humanities Forward, a forum for tackling the most important issues and challenges facing Humanities researchers over the next two decades. My next steps involve building on this conference (follow our nascent Twitter @HumanitiesFWD), connecting like-minded scholars, and spearheading greater interaction with policymakers.
Whether my post-DPhil life will lead me into pedagogy, more research, or something entirely different, none of my personal and academic development would have been possible without the incredible support of the Ertegun House community. I am deeply grateful for my scholarship and so excited to spend many years in the company of like-minded scholars blazing innovative trails all throughout the Humanities. Here is a model of scholarship where interdisciplinarity, well-being, and collaboration are all structurally embedded, a model that inspires me and will perhaps inspire the future of the Humanities.
