Camil Francisc Roman completed a doctoral thesis on the political anthropology of the French revolution in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge. He has a highly cross- and interdisciplinary focus on modern revolutions as symbolic and experiential processes of transforming modes of consciousness. Having lived extensively in four different countries and benefiting over a strong intercultural background, Professor Roman is interested in reflexive and interpretative approaches to the human sciences, with an emphasis on anthropologically and historically oriented theory. The long-term goal of his research is to contribute to our understanding of European modernity, inquiring into the multi-faceted and tightly connected phenomena of imperialism/colonialism, secularization and globalization and into the ways in which the modern political and social construction of human nature interferes with human flourishing and the possibilities of a life with meaning.
Professor Roman is currently working on three different yet closely related research projects. In the first, he looks at the modern construal of ‘knowledge’ and attempts to lay ‘knowledge’ on anthropological foundations by moving beyond the epistemological foundationalism of modern philosophy and showing that no form of knowledge can ever be entirely metaphysics-free. In this context, ‘history’ becomes the single most important methodological issue in the social sciences, making a revisiting of classical and Christian philosophy, the distant roots of modern philosophy, essential. In the second, he is looking at the birth of modern politics during the French revolution and tries to provide a political anthropological reading of the modern democratic imaginary that tackles the problem of nihilism at its very core, going beyond the taken for granted discourses of disciplinary history, sociology, political theory/doctrines, and political philosophy/science. In a third research project, he is co-editing a book on theology and technology in which he is attempting to think anew theology’s permutations within modern secular thought, inquiring into the relation between the two types of human practice (theology and technology) and its effects on political existence and the realm of politics.
Latest publications
2016 - ‘The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the Prussian Political Imaginary: a Political Anthropological Genealogy of the ‘Special’ German-French relations’, Journal of International Relations and Development, doi:10.1057/s41268-016-0073-x.
Introduction Section – ‘The Welcome of the Editor and the Guest Editor to the Symposium on Tilo Shabert, The Second Birth: On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence’, International Political Anthropology, 9:2 (2016), pp.3-8. Co-authored with Agnes Horvath.
2015 - ‘Liminality, the execution of Louis XVI and the rise of terror during the French Revolution’, in Bjorn Thomassen, Agnes Horvath and Harald Wydra (eds.) Breaking boundaries: varieties of liminality (Oxford: Berghahn Books), pp.141-163.
2014 - ‘Walking and praying into the condition of the witness: steps towards a non-sacrificial philosophical anthropology’, International Political Anthropology, 7:2 (2014), pp.59-78.
