Tuesday, June 16, 2026

Margareta Matache publishes The Permanence of Anti-Roma Racism: (Un)uttered Sentences

Margareta Matache has published The Permanence of Anti-Roma Racism: (Un)uttered Sentences with Routledge. Matache is a lecturer in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-founder and director of the Roma Program at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.

The Permanence of Anti-Roma Racism examines anti-Roma racism as one of Europe’s oldest and most enduring racisms and argues that it must be understood as a structural and historically embedded system of oppression. The book traces the roots of anti-Roma racism to the system of racialized slavery in Moldavia and Wallachia and to the politics of killings, expulsions, and entry bans across Europe in the late Middle Ages and early modern period.

The book integrates Romani-centered epistemology, historical analysis, and engagement with existing theories of racialization, structural oppression, and racialized systems of slavery. It situates anti-Roma racism within both intra-European histories and broader global scholarship.