Faculty Profiles

Valentina Glajar is Professor of German Studies and Honorary Professor of International Studies at Texas State University, where 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 awarded to Texas State University. This fellowship enabled her to complete her monograph, The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller (Camden House, 2023). The book received the 2023 George Blazyca Prize from the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. The Romanian translation, Dosarul de Securitate al Hertei Müller, by Alina Pavelescu (Polirom, 2025), was accompanied by a nationwide book tour and media interviews organized by Polirom. Her book was selected by the Romanian Ministry of Culture to represent Romania at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2026.

She has recently completed Never Make a Spy out of Me (CEU Press, forthcoming February 2027) and is currently researching declassified CIA and Securitate files for her next 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.