Irina D. Mihalache

Irina D. Mihalache was born in Bucharest, Romania under Communist rule. Witnessing a transitioning society face new forms of politics, consumption and media motivated her to study Communication during her undergraduate degree at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph College) in Lynchburg, VA. Professor Mihalache obtained her MA at New York University in the French Studies Program, where she became interested in post-colonial museums in France. She moved to Ottawa to pursue a doctorate in communication studies, writing her dissertation about the Institute of the Arab World in Paris. Before joining the Faculty of Information in January 2013, she spent one year as A.W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Global Communication at the American University of Paris.

Professor Mihalache’s principal goal in teaching and research is to understand how museums do the work that they do in their political and cultural contexts. She believes that the only way to truly understand the work of an institution is to look critically at the history of its spaces, practices and communities.