Faculty Profiles

Valentina Glajar is Professor of German Studies and Honorary Professor of International Studies at Texas State University. She serves as coordinator of the German Division in the Department of World Languages and Literatures.

She has authored and co-edited several books on German-language literature from Central and Eastern Europe, the work of Nobel laureate Herta Müller, Romanies, the Holocaust in Romania, and Western representations of East European women. As an accredited external researcher at the Romanian National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives since 2011, Glajar has co-edited two books (with Alison Lewis and Corina L. Petrescu): Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc (Camden House, 2016) and Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe (Potomac Books, 2019).

In 2019, Glajar received the first ACLS Fellowship at Texas State, which allowed her to complete her monograph, The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller (Camden House, 2023). The book was awarded the 2025 George Blazyca Prize by the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies. Alina Pavelescu translated the book into Romanian, titled Dosarul de Securitate al Hertei Müller, which was published by the Romanian press Polirom in March 2025. To promote the book, Polirom organized TV and radio interviews for Glajar and arranged a book tour to major Romanian cities in the summer of 2025.

She has recently completed Never Make a Spy out of Me (CEU Press, forthcoming), and is currently working on declassified CIA and Securitate files for her new project on German Romanian spies working for American intelligence in the 1940s and 1950s.

Glajar holds a B.A. in German from the University Babes-Bolyai Cluj, Romania, and a Ph.D. in German Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.