Moscaliuc, Mihaela

Interview date: November 15, 2017
Interviewee: Dr. Mihaela Moscaliuc
Interviewer/Transcriber: Robert Scott, III
Summarized by: Robert Scott, III
Edited by: Michael Achimov

Doctor Mihaela Moscaliuc is an Assistant Professor of English and Career Advising Mentor at Monmouth University. She is an active member of the faculty who also attends and participates in events throughout the campus. She is also a motivated scholar of the English Arts as she spent a large portion of the interview discussing the importance of the English major. 

Moscaliuc was born in Romania during the Communist era. She was very fascinated by the English language and started learning it before she decided to pursue an education in English. She received her BA and MA in Romania before immigrating to the United States to attended Salisbury University in Maryland where she graduated in 1996 with an MA. She would then receive a PhD in American Literature at the University of Maryland College Park and an MFA in Creative Writing from New England College 

Moscaliuc started working for Monmouth University as an adjunct in 2008 and as a visiting writer for the MFA  program at Drew University, a program she directed from 2011-2012, before returning to Monmouth University as Assistant Professor in Anglophone World Literature. 

Since she was motivated to become an English professor at an early age, Moscaliuc talked about how English can be applied to various fields, including healthcare, through the practice of “narrative medicine.” She teaches this concept in depth in her Illness in Literature course, where the majority of her students have majors in health studies or nursing. 

Moscaliuc is also a published poet who has toured over 25 schools in the United States and abroad to read from her work and give workshops. She feels that Monmouth University is unique because of the sense of community among her fellow faculty members, both inside and outside of the English Department. This comradery is not just with projects, but with plans of how to improve Monmouth University. 

She is also passionate about learning and teaching about the Roma people. She designed and teaches an Interdisciplinary course dedicated to the history and culture of the Roma; in 2017 she invited Professor Joanna Talewicz-Kwiatkowska from Jagiellonian University in Poland to lecture about the Roma during the Holocaust. Moscaliuc is of Roma descent through her mother’s ancestors, but the main reason for advocating for the Roma comes from an interest in social justice. When she lived in Romania, she volunteered to work with Roma children in the city of Iaşi and expressed concern that the cycle of poverty keeps the Roma discriminated against. She would like to see more diversity at Monmouth University, and among the newly enrolled student demographics she would like to see Roma; New Jersey has a fairly large Roma population. 

The advice that Moscaliuc has for students is to find a passion and see how it can be pursued and sustained. Outside of the interview, she also informed me that she would like to advise students to detach from social media to achieve true happiness.