Brief Biography

Ovidiu Olar holds a PhD in history, granted by the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), in 2015. Previously, he studied in Iași, Perugia, and Bucharest. Researcher of the “N. Iorga” Institute of History of the Romanian Academy (Bucharest) [2010-] and research fellow at the Chair in the History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey at Ruhr-Universität Bochum [2015-2018], Ovidiu Olar held fellowships at the New Europe College in Bucharest (2007-2008), Institut d’Histoire de la Réformation in Geneva (October – November 2008), the Scaliger Institute in Leiden (October – November 2009), and École française d’Athènes (June 2009, February 2010). He was involved in several projects, such as the FP 7 EU project Anticorrp – Anticorruption Policies Revisited: Global Trends and European Responses to the Challenge of Corruption [2012-2017] and the DFG project Bibliographische Datenbank zur Geschichtsschreibung im Osmanischen Europa (15.–18 Jh.)” [2015-2018].

Research Interests

Period: 15th-19th centuries
Area: Eastern and Southeastern Europe
Topics: History of political ideas, cultural history, Early Modern adventurers, the religious reforms and the confessional “Cold War” of the 17th century.

Selected Publications

• Writing History in Ottoman Europe, 15th–18th Centuries. Co-ed. with Konrad Petrovszky (forthcoming)
• La boutique de Théophile. Les relations du patriarche de Constantinople Kyrillos Loukaris (1570-1638) avec la Réforme, Paris: Centre d’études byzantines, néo-helléniques et sud-est européennes – EHESS (“Autour de Byzance”) 2019.
• “« The Father and his Eldest Son ». The Depiction of the 1667 Muscovite Palm Sunday Procession by the Metropolitan of Gaza Paisios Ligaridis and its Significance”, Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 235/1 (2018): 5-36.
• “Corruption and Anticorruption in the Romanian Principalities: Rules of Governance, Exceptions, and Networks, Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century”, in Ronald Kroeze / André Vitória / Guy Geltner (ed.), Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to the Modern Era, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018, pp. 225-238 (text), 366-371 (notes).
• “Orthodoxy and Politics: The Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, the Prince Mihnea III Radu of Walachia and the Great Church of Constantinople”, in Ines G. Županov / Pierre Antoine Fabre (ed.), The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World, Leiden-Boston: Brill 2018, pp. 233-263.
• Răzbunare împotriva tiranilor. Teoria politică a protestantismului francez [Vindiciæ contra Tyrannos. The Political Theory of the French Protestantism], Bucharest: Nemira (“Idei politice fundamentale”) 2007.