Virgil Nemoianu (Romanian pronunciation: [virˈd͡ʒil nemoˈjanu], born March 12, 1940) is a Romanian-American essayist, literary critic, and philosopher of culture.

His thinking places him at the intersection of neo-Platonism and neo-Kantianism, which he turned into an instrument meant to qualify, channel, and tame the asperities, as well as what he regarded the impatient accelerations and even absurdities of modernity and post-modernity.

The origin of both sides of the family was the Banat (a southwestern province of Romania), where Virgil Nemoianu spent his elementary school years and all summers until he was 20).

These early years and the influence of his grandparents marked all his life with a deep commitment to Central Europe, its values, and its archaic and "idyllic" customs.

He gained permission to travel to the United States, defected[1] and obtained a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of California, San Diego in 1971.

He drew from the traditions of Romanian thinking and criticism (Titu Maiorescu, Eugen Lovinescu, Tudor Vianu, and Lucian Blaga), and even more strongly from the aesthetic humanist doctrines of the Sibiu Literary Circle, as articulated by Ion Negoițescu, Ștefan Augustin Doinaș and others of the same group.

Among them there was a book-length essay on structuralism (accompanied by an anthology), a selection of texts by Walter Pater, G. K. Chesterton, and T. S. Eliot, and two volumes of collected articles (1971 and 1973).

He has participated in three dozen scholarly conferences, some of which he organized himself and in others of which he chaired sessions, in North America, Africa, Europe, Oceania, and Asia.

[3] Nemoianu's chief fields of research interest and accomplishment are European Romanticism, the intellectual history of the 19th and 20th Centuries, and aesthetic theory.

Nemoianu has argued constantly, though in different contexts and using different examples, that without a sense and grasp of the beautiful, human life would be radically impoverished and perhaps its very survival might be endangered.

His intellectual guides in this regard were Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac and Romano Guardini, as well as a number of Orthodox theologians and thinkers.

The fourth is that the "Romantic age" (or simply the period 1770–1848) was a fundamental turning point in human history, the period in which durable images and thinking models were devised as a response to the consciousness of a globalization of human affairs and an acceleration of history; Nemoianu repeatedly used an examination of this age as an analogy to contemporary events (particularly in books published in 1984, 2004, and 2006).

They have one son, Virgil Martin Nemoianu, born 1974, who is now associate professor in the Philosophy Department of Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.