Dr. Luminita Gatejel is a senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg. She received her PhD from the University of Tübingen in 2010 and was a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
She has published extensively on the history of automobility, everyday life and consumption in the Eastern Bloc. She is the author of Warten, hoffen und endlich fahren: Auto und Sozialismus in der Sowjetunion, in Rumänien und der DDR, 1956 – 1989/91 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus 2014). She is currently researching the technological and environmental remaking of the Lower Danube in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her second book is Engineering the Lower Danube. Technology and International Cooperation in an Imperial Borderland (Budapest: CEU Press, 2022).