Ileana (Voichita) Nachescu is currently Teaching Instructor (full time) in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University. A scholar of American Studies and transnational feminism, she is the recipient of an Excellence in Teaching award from the University at Buffalo and of grants from the Open Society Institute and Central European University. In 1998, she co-founded the first Women’s Studies Center at her alma mater, the University of the West, Timisoara, Romania.

She is currently finishing the monograph titled A Dimension of Humanism: Intellectual Activism and the National Alliance of Black Feminists (1974-1983), which she started writing when she was a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University. This project centers the history of the women’s liberation movement during the long 1970s on the activist and theoretical work of Midwestern African American feminists. Her second book project uses critical whiteness studies and a transnational feminist analysis to explore the experiences of recent Eastern Europeans immigrants dispossessed by their countries’ entrance into the global circuits of neoliberal capitalism after the end of state socialism. She has chronicled the Romanian LGBTQ movement in both academic writing and journalism. Her recent work has appeared in the collections “Lifting as We Climb”: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History, edited by Hettie V. Williams (2017), Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education, edited by Santosh Khadka et al. (2018) a,d Women’s Studies Quarterly (2013).

In her creative nonfiction, she attempts to map the fraught and shifting contours of home from an immigrant’s perspective. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is at work on a book-length project, Memoirs of a Socialist Childhood, in which she seeks to explore the articulations of gender, class, and race in a society of equals.