Theodor Paleologu

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Paleologu in 2014

Theodor Paleologu (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈte.odor pale.oˈloɡu]; born July 15, 1973) is a Romanian historian, diplomat and politician. A member of the People's Movement Party (PMP) and formerly of the Democratic Liberal Party (PD-L), he has been a member of the Romanian Chamber of Deputies for Bucharest since 2008. Additionally, in the first two Emil Boc cabinets, from December 2008 to December 2009 he was Minister of Culture, Religious Affairs and Cultural Heritage.

Biography

The son of Olimpia and Alexandru Paleologu, he was born in Bucharest and completed secondary studies at the city's German High School. He then attended University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne from 1992 to 1998, where he obtained undergraduate and master's degrees in Philosophy. He also attended the École Normale Supérieure from 1996 to 2001, and from 1998 to 2001, worked on a doctorate in political sciences at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He was a lecturer at Boston College from 1999 to 2000, a visiting professor at Deep Springs College in 2003, and a research fellow at the University of Notre Dame (2001–2002), New York University (2002), Harvard University (2002–2003) and the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin (2005). He was an external lecturer at the University of Copenhagen in 2007 and 2008, and since 2003 has been assistant professor and director of the summer university at the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin. Between 2005 and 2008, he served as Romania's ambassador to Denmark and Iceland; he resigned from the office in order to pursue his successful parliamentary campaign.

In the Chamber, he sits on the Arts, Culture and Mass Media Committee. As minister, his top priority was the preservation of Romania's historic monuments. His ministerial term ended when he was not reappointed to a new cabinet under Boc at the end of 2009. At the 2012 local election, he ran for mayor of Bucharest's Sector 1, finishing second with 14.1% of the vote. Running in the legislative election later that year, he placed second in his district, but won another term through the redistribution mechanism specified by the electoral law. In February 2014, he followed Elena Udrea in resigning from the PD-L and joining the People's Movement Party (PMP).

He has written two books, one on Carl Schmitt (2004) and one on the year 2004 in Romanian politics (2005). In 2013, he began holding private courses on the humanities and diplomacy in his family home. He was married to Sarah Nassif, a French opera singer of Lebanese origin. The two are divorced and have one son, Mihail.