Ovidiu Coriolan Pecican (born January 8, 1959) is a Romanian historian, essayist, novelist, short-story writer, literary critic, poet, playwright, and journalist of partly Serbian origin.

During the late 1970s, he was active in the underground movie-making movement in his native city, as a member of the Atelier 16 Club, together with Gheorghe Sabău, Mircea Mihăieş, Ioan T. Morar, Valentin Constantin, Alexandru Pecican and others.

The volume was submitted to Ministry approval, and caused a political scandal after its content became known to the public — its critics argued that it lacked structure and balance, that it discarded traditional historiography in themes and discourse,[2][3][4] and even that part of the information was purely trivial.

[2][3] The National Liberal politician and historian Adrian Cioroianu, himself the co-author of a new manual and a vocal critic of the methods of Pecican's adversaries during the polemic, publicly sided with the Sigma authors, and argued in their favor during televised confrontations with Marius Tucă and Octavian Paler.

[3] In 2002, the PSD Minister Ecaterina Andronescu removed it from the list of endorsed textbooks, which caused Pecican to issue a formal protest,[4][6] supported by, among others, the historian and West University professor Victor Neumann.

[4] In late October 2005, the journalist Melania Mandaș Vergu published an article in Gândul on the issue of Pecican's alleged candidature for government office in Prime Minister Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu's Justice and Truth cabinet.

[10] Replying in Cotidianul, Pecican dismissed the tone and content of the article as "deliberate manipulation and distortion", while recalling that, during the 1999 polemic, the respective journalist had published what he called "curse words" (sudălmi) aimed at Sigma authors.

[11] Also in 2005, Pecican was among the group of intellectuals who reacted to the controversial views held by the exiled writer Paul Goma on issues involving Bessarabia and World War II Romanian history.

Trapped between Eastern Orthodox ethos and Slavonic language, on one hand, and the Western or Latin influences, on the other, the old Romanian culture of the 11th-17th centuries faced a large variety of challenges, and showed a remarkable diversity.

Troia, Veneția, Roma (1998) deals with the imagined homelands of the Vlachs as they result from old written fragments conserved in later contexts, laying out some of the main characteristics of Romanian identity at the time of its first making.

Cultura ero(t)ică in Moldova lui Ștefan cel Mare (2005) attempts to provide the reader with a different image of the national hero Stephen the Great, Prince of Moldavia (1457–1504), who was sanctified by the Romanian Orthodox Church.

In Între cruciați și tătari (2006), the attempt is to understand the challenges confronting post-1989 Romania and its longing for integration into NATO and the European Union, by comparing them with the years between the Fourth Crusade (1204) and the Mongol Invasion (1241–1243), when the Western world extended itself down to the Carpathians.

O odisee a receptării (2003) and B. P. Hasdeu istoric (2004), books developed from his PhD thesis, attempt to explain how, through the efforts of several leading intellectuals during the second part of the 19th century, modern nationalism, together with liberalism, formed a nationalist identity.

Nine years later, Pecican published a third novel, Imberia, which depicts the daily dilemmas a young intellectual has to face in post-communist Romania during the transition period (including sexual alienation and the trauma of his father's death).