Daniel Barbu (b. May 21, 1957) is a Romanian political scientist, publisher, essayist, journalist, and professor at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Political Science. The head of the Research Institute at the University of Bucharest, and former dean of the Faculty, he was also director of Realitatea Românească, a daily newspaper, in 1991-1992. Barbu worked as a State Adviser for President Emil Constantinescu between 1997 and 1999. He is the author as of June 2007 of eight books and many more articles on political science, and a contributor to the magazine Sfera Politicii.
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Barbu was born in Bucharest, and graduated from the Nicolae Bălcescu High School (the present-day Saint Sava National College) in 1976. In 1976, the Union of Communist Youth, official youth organization in Communist Romania, refused to grant him permission to attend either the Faculty of History-Philosophy or that of Law. Consequently, Barbu attended Art History in Cluj-Napoca, at the present-day Babeş-Bolyai University, graduating in 1980. He then was employed as a curator at the Village Museum (1980) and the National Museum of Romanian History (1981–1986). Between 1987 and 1992, he was a researcher at Bucharest University's Institute of South-Eastern European Studies.
After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, he took doctoral training in Switzerland, at the University of Fribourg's Faculty of Theology; he received a Ph.D. in history from the Babeş-Bolyai University in 1991. In 1999, he took a second doctorate, in Philosophy, from the University of Bucharest, where he has been teaching since 1991.
Between 1990 and 1991, he was head of Editura Meridiane, a prestigious Bucharest-based publishing house.
Barbu was the Dean of the Political Science Department of the University of Bucharest from 1994 to 2000, and then again from 2002 to 2004. Since 2004, he has been the Political Science Chair of the Political Science Department of the University of Bucharest.
He has been a visiting Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, the La Sapienza University in Rome, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Pittsburg State University, Jackson State University, and many others.
Barbu has specialized in the Comparative History of European Civilizations, Political Science and Comparative Political Science, Social and Political Models of the State, Minorities and Confessional Groups in Romania, Constitutions, Government, and Politics in Europe, Totalitarian Regimes, Communisme et Socialisme d'État, and Political Anthropology.