Raluca Soreanu was Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge in 2009 and 2010. Raluca received her PhD in International Relations from University College London, United Kingdom, in 2011. She is Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK.

Raluca’s research interests lie within sociology of emotions, sociology of creativity, psychoanalytic sociology, sociology of knowledge, sociology of disciplinary change, and critical theories in International Relations. Her doctoral dissertation formulates a theory of outlaw emotions and makes a case for placing the category of emotion at the heart of our pursuits in understanding social process, while taking insights from interaction ritual theories (Randall Collins), psychoanalytic theories (Cornelius Castoriadis), and feminist theories. The study draws on a series of free association narrative interviews with scholars in International Relations, and shows how emotions such as rage, anger, embarrassment, and humiliation have been at the root of different forms of creativity, and have allowed new theoretical developments in the field.

Another accent of Raluca’s research falls on feminist knowledge production and the ways in which various feminist projects have reshaped the organisation of knowledge in the social sciences. Finally, Raluca is interested in the nature and process of creativity, and is preparing a co-edited book on “Creativity and the Imagination as Social Resources” (with Marysia Zalewski).

Raluca's postdoctoral agenda is to theorise synchronicity from an interactionist perspective, while looking at the relationship between social suffering, creativity and collective process, in the case of new social movements in Europe and Latin America.

Previously, Raluca was Teaching Fellow at University College London, with the course ‘International Relations Theories: Continental Perspectives’, and Visiting Scholar at the Wagner Graduate School, New York University. She holds an MA in International Relations and European Studies from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary (2006); an MA in Cultural Studies from Lund University, Sweden (2005); a BA in Sociology (2005) and a BA in Political Science (2005) from 'Babes-Bolyai' University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.