I write essays, criticism, and memoir on a wide range of topics. My work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the James Beard Foundation’s MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, and received the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for nonfiction. One piece was included in Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen and Bob Atwan, with five others selected as notables between 2013 and 2021. My essays have also been reprinted in Holly Hughes’ Best Food Writing 2017, Jay McInerney’s Wine Reads: A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing (2018), Longreads, The Rumpus, and in the Romanian literary journal Scena9.
Memoir
“I Spent My Life Avoiding Thrills. Then My Son Discovered Roller Coasters” / The Walrus
“Ziua în care a murit Regina” (“The Day the Queen Died“) / Scena9
“Modul de supraviețuire” / Scena9
“The Professor” / Longreads
“Tongue Stuck” / The Rumpus
“Trash” / The Dalhousie Review
“How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries” / Longreads
“Someone is Wrong on the Internet: A Study in Pandemic Distraction” / Literary Hub
“Home truths: A dispatch from Germany” / Times Literary Supplement
“O limbă lipită de cerul gurii” / Scena9
“Reading Lessons” How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound. Eds. Kaitlin Heller and Suzanne Conklin Akbari (Reprinted in Longreads)
“The Kid Is All Right: In Defense of Picky Eating” / Serious Eats
“An Unreliable Alchemy” / The Marginalia Review of Books
“Swan, Late: The Unexpected Joys of Adult Beginner Ballet” Longreads
“The Things We Take, The Things We Leave Behind” / Southwest Review (Romanian in Scena9)
“Dance, Mama” / The Manifest-Station
“My Father and the Wine.” The Yale Review (reprinted in Best American Essays 2016; Wine Reads: A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing)
“Currywurst” / Petits Propos Culinaires
“Tasting Texas” / Southwest Review
Playful Pieces
“Line” / Brevity Magazine
“Improv” / Iberian Connections
“Shift” / The Enneadecameron
Criticism
“The rest of the iceberg: Three guides to writing personal narrative” / TLS
“Scratch the surface: What psoriasis tells us about social outcasts” / TLS
“Bad Company: A New Novel Strips Away the Veneer of Progressive Rhetoric” / The Walrus
“Different words for blue: How mother tongues are lost and found” / TLS
“A Family Shatters Along With Yugoslavia” / New York Times
“Industrious Habits” / New York Review of Books
“Smell the burn: What is the point of physical exercise?” / TLS
“The Beauty of Imperfection” / Los Angeles Review of Books
“A Heroine’s Journey: On Lana Bastašić’s “Catch the Rabbit”” / LARB
“Don’t Get Too Comfortable” / NYRB
“When You Roast Your Friends in a Book, and One’s Your Landlord” / NYT
“The Flower and the Bee” / London Review of Books
“Let us now tell sad stories: Why we might write about trauma” / TLS
“Dudes Without Heirs” / NYRB
“Time travelling in comfort: An invitation to take guidance from the voices of the past” / TLS
“How to Read Aloud” / LRB
“In Praise of Solitude” / LARB
“Making My Moan” / LRB
“Quiet magic: The best ways to cultivate good writing” / TLS
“Theater of War” / NYT
“Cooking as a profound art: Reflections on the culinary and the literary” / TLS
“Heel turns: The history of modern celebrity” / TLS (Latvian in Rigas Laiks)
“Door Open for Beauty: On Deborah Tobola’s “Hummingbird in Underworld: Teaching in a Men’s Prison, a Memoir” LARB
“Renaissance Man” / NYT (Spanish in El Cultural)
“Physical, cultural, personal: The demands of dance” / TLS
“Hunger Games: Three Memoirs Where Food Takes Center Stage.” NYT
“Literature as Lifeline: The Exile in “Call Me Zebra”” / LARB
Brief reviews
“Melancholy catalogues: Kathryn Schulz’s powerful memoir about loss” / TLS
“Out of the bag: Understanding the strange power that animals exercise over people” / TLS
“Look backwards, fly forwards: A woman searches for her father – and herself – in fictional West Africa” / TLS
“Speaking in Tongues: Paul McQuade’s startling and casually surreal stories about language” / TLS
“Somewhat cheery: Hersh Dovid Nomberg’s tales of generational guilt and obstructed love” / TLS
“Rings of Sarajevo: The fears, losses – and successes – that thread through a life in exile” / TLS
“Stifled by cookie-cutters: Lessons in the art – and vocation – of publishing a book” / TLS
“Old love, new tricks: Revisiting a medieval bestseller” / TLS
“Homely ceremonies: Seeking pleasure in harsh circumstances” / TLS
“Dance Macabre” / TLS
“Dance” / TLS
“Electric conversations: Twenty-five writers reflect on the magazines and journals they have enjoyed over the years” / TLS
“Old English” / TLS
Column
“Eating their words: Physical encounters with books” / TLS
“In the family: Our suffocating desire to heal another person” / TLS
“Signal virtue: The pleasures of a confusing Old English Saint’s Life” / TLS
“A tale of two Alfreds: Burnt cakes and twice-foreign pasts” / TLS
“Old mischief in new guise: Keeping your focus in the age of distraction” / TLS
“The art of improv: Wobbling through life” / TLS
“Plain speaking: How to write well” / TLS
“Burnout culture: A disconnect between expectation and reality” / TLS
“Beyond the girlboss: On the representation of women” / TLS
“Our debt to pleasure: Nurturing delight in a dangerous world” / TLS
Essays
“Time for a Long Pause” / The Chronicle of Higher Education Review
“The void that fills the void” / European Review of Books
“The Frenzied Folly of Professorial Groupthink” / The Chronicle of Higher Education Review
“Addressing toxic behaviour is in universities’ interest” / Times Higher Education
“Rereading the Revolt” / Public Books
“Queen Kris” / Avidly
“Are you a toxic enabler?” / THE
“How to Cope With a Fear of Public Writing” / The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Get medieval on your haters: lessons from Beowulf and Chaucer” / Psyche
“Heroism should not be part of the academic job description” / THE
“We’re all Jessica Rabbit Now. Self-fashioning for the YouTube generation” / TLS
“Time to Get Over Your Discomfort With Book Marketing” / The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Struggling to exercise upward toxicity? Try toxic hypocrisy” / THE
“What Academics Misunderstand About ‘Public Writing’” / The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Ten rules for succeeding in academia through upward toxicity” / THE
“‘Bio-Nazis’ go green in Germany” / Politico Europe
“Teachers and Students” / Aeon
“Appetite (and iron-clad stomach) for success. The art of stuffing yourself while chancellor” / Politico.eu
“The Curious Appeal of ‘Bad’ Food” / The Atlantic (Reprinted in Best Food Writing 2017)
“‘Frivolous’ Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania” / Zócalo Public Square
“War and the Food of Dreams: An Interview with Cara De Silva” / Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi, ed. Irina Dumitrescu
“Terpsichore” / Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi, ed. Irina Dumitrescu
“Why ‘that’ photo mattered this time: Our children could be on that beach, too” / Washington Post
“On the Future of Old English” / In the Middle
“The School’s Embrace.” / This Book is a Class Room, eds. Lucie Kolb and Romy Rüegger
“Hidden Treasures at the Met Museum” / In the Middle
Short pieces & Forum Contributions
“What is the happiest academic career stage?” / THE
“A tropical atoll lies in prospect: Twenty TLS writers share their summer reading.” / TLS
“My worst teaching moment – and what it taught me” / THE
“Are you ready for the return to in-person teaching?” / THE
“Moving mountains: the reforms that would push academia to new heights” / THE
“Life in the Zoomiverse: What we miss about the physical campus” / THE
“Should you be working 100 hours a week?” / THE
“A Place of Absence, Loss, and Transcendence” / Zócalo Public Square
Irina Dumitrescu 