what reviewers said…

about Romanian Joyce: From Hostility to Hospitality:

Ionescu presents an impressive breadth of Romanian responses to Joyce in a particularly elegant and accessible style. Thanks to her excellent translations of Romanian criticism and literature, non-Romanian speaking readers can easily grasp Romanian wordplays and puns. Romanian Joyce is a fascinating study of the ways in which Joyce’s work diffuses into the Romanian literary scene, and it is a very welcome addition to Joyce studies, creatively extending the ways in which we think about Joyce’s reception, translations, and re-creation. (Ágota Márton, University of Oxford, in James Joyce Quarterly)

about The Memorial Ethics of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum:

Ionescu’s study is a valuable and novel addition to debates about Holocaust representation, with her contribution most clearly evidenced in her linking of philosophy (Levinas’s ‘ethics as optics’) with place (Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum). Her interpretation
compels her readers to take seriously the proposition that commemorative spaces can and should ignite and provoke both our cognitive and affective capacities. Ionescu’s work is a
plea to move beyond the too-often repeated clichés associated with Holocaust memory, and a recognition of the radical responsibility that this history, and these places, bestow upon their witnesses. (Avril Alba, University of Sydney, in Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History)

about Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma:

The highly original and well-written essays of the collection show the value in the current mood of traumatic (mis)representation and, as is the explicit goal of the volume, “pluralize and decolonize […] theories of trauma, taking into consideration the varied transcultural contexts that shape both individual and collective experiences of violence, terror, victimization or injustice” (xxx). (Iro Filippaki, National and Kapodistrian University, in Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies)