[1] Her book Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930, published by Cornell University Press, was awarded Heldt Prize (1995) by the Association of Women in Slavic Studies.
"[5] Based on the book, University of Tampa professor Thomas J. Hegarty argued that "Romania's swollen bureaucracy, in alliance with the nationalist intelligentsia for whom it provided employment, attempted to compensate for the thinness of ethnic Romanian urban civil society with an interventionist strategy of cultural activism.
[5] Building on the conclusions of Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell, as well as on her interpretation of texts by fascist politician Nichifor Crainic, she proposed that Romanian fascism was actually a revolutionary-minded aspect of earlier conservative nationalism.
[5] One of Livezeanu's main conclusions deals with the competing social and political projects of the period, and specifically with the contrast between, on one side, the urbane and capitalist goals of National Liberal theorists such as Ştefan Zeletin, and, on the other, rural protectionist and populist ideas both right-wing and left-wing (from the Iron Guard and the peasant theocracy imagined by Nae Ionescu to socialist-influenced Poporanism).
[5] However, she proposed that the education reform carried out by the National Liberal politician Spiru Haret, often seen as a victory of Poporanism, was actually proof of the party having an elaborate plan to modernize the rural areas.
[5] Thus, she argued, the policies of Haret and his colleague Constantin Anghelescu were partly overturned by supporters of rural protectionism, both populist (Alexandru Averescu) and fascist (the Iron Guard's National Legionary State).
[5] Livezeanu's thesis on the birth of Romanian fascism was criticized by Constantin Iordachi, who argued that the link between the local middle class and far right movement was only obvious in the cases of fascist intellectuals such as Nae Ionescu and Crainic, whereas the Iron Guard is known to have engaged in an open conflict and, eventually, a bloody battle with moderate nationalist groupings.
"[5] Historian Ovidiu Pecican also cited Livezeanu's study, alongside those of Jean Ancel, as evidence that the image of interwar Romania as "solely nimbed by the progresses following stately unification" needed to be amended.