Leon Feraru and the Invention of Romanian Cultural Diplomacy in the United States

Join the Romanian Cultural Institute and the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute for an event in the Leon Feraru Conference Series, featuring professors Mona Momescu and Christopher J. Caes.

Click here to RSVP.

To honor the memory of the writer, academic, and diplomat who did more than anybody else at the beginning of the 20th century to promote Romanian culture & arts in the United States, we’re pleased to announce the launch of the Romanian Cultural Institute’s newest permanent program, The Leon Feraru Conference Series. Set up in partnership with Columbia University’s East Central European Center as a platform for Romanian-American intellectual dialogue, the series debuts with a talk and exhibition devoted to the great man himself.

Leon Feraru (1887-1960), poet, academic, diplomat, and journalist, was the most active figure of the Romanian-American cultural relations at the beginning of the 20th Century. He truly is, as the first co-director of the Institute of Romanian Culture established at Columbia University in 1925, the very founder of the Romanian cultural diplomacy in the United States. Born Otto Enselberg/Inselberg in Brăila, Romania, Feraru came to America in 1913 and taught Romanian language and literature at Columbia University and Long Island University. For several years in the 1920s he was the Honorary Consul of the Kingdom of Romania in New York. A delicate, yet forceful poet, doubled by a relentless cultural promoter and a keen journalist, Feraru was instrumental in creating the first coherent means – like institutions, academic courses and publications – to make Romanian culture better known to the American public. His publications include the first anthology of Romanian verse published in the United States. He was the published of the official magazine of the Romanian community in New York, the bi-lingual Our Star and the New Rumania. Upon his death, his friends issued A Prospectus for a Volume in Memory of a Distinguished Romanian Poet Containing Tributes, Appreciations, Miscellanea, Will Be Published in the Near Future. It contains several poems by Feraru and many blank pages. The Leon Feraru Conference Series is both an homage to his inspiring work and an attempt to fill those empty pages with initiatives Feraru would appreciate and support.