02/07/2026 10:10 - 12:20

HALL: Pola - A204

Contact: Danca W.

Chair: Danca W.

To commemorate 40 years since Mircea Eliade's passing, we are trying to find out how his work and thinking were received among Italian and American specialists. Some of his "disciples" have remained faithful to his intellectual horizon, even if they have followed other methods in studying religious phenomena, while others have distanced themselves from their master, not for methodological or theoretical reasons, but rather for political ones.
By redrawing the map of Mircea Eliade's reception in Italy and the United States, we seek to find out if there is a generation of Eliadists and what the stakes of their research are. We also want to find out what the effects of political criticism of Mircea Eliade's work are.
Specialists in Eliade's work from the United States, Italy, and Romania will present critical and less critical receptions of Mircea Eliade's work with reference to specialized literature from the United States and Italy.
The panel chair is an Eliade scholar with a thesis on Romanian and European philosophical influences in the development of the notion of the sacred in Mircea Eliade's work.