Adelina Stefan awarded Society for Romanian Studies Book Prize for Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain

After careful deliberation, the Book Prize Committee – Maria Asavei, Alexandru Săvoaia, and Constantin Ardeleanu (chair) – unanimously selected Adelina Ștefan as the winner for her monograph Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain (Cornell University Press, 2024).

Ștefan’s book argues that mass tourism was not only a leisure industry, but also a powerful force of modernization and social transformation in postwar Europe. Through a carefully constructed comparison of socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain, she demonstrates that both regimes “chose to develop international tourism for similar reasons and international tourism affected the two countries in relatively similar ways, despite their different political and economic systems and their locations on different sides of the Iron Curtain.” Drawing on research conducted in a dozen archives across Europe and the United States, Ștefan shows how the influx of foreign visitors stimulated what she calls “modernization from below.” Exposure to Western consumer goods, fashions, and lifestyles challenged established gender norms and reshaped everyday life in subtle ways. By conceptualizing tourism as a form of “soft diplomacy,” Ștefan also shows how leisure culture quietly, but meaningfully transformed authoritarian regimes across Europe’s ideological and geopolitical spectrum. Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, Vacationing in Dictatorships makes a major contribution to Romanian Studies, enriching the field while also opening new avenues for comparative analysis in Cold War history.