Early years

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 Babeș-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.

Post-1989

After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, he took doctoral training in Germany, at the University of Fribourg's Faculty of Theology; he received a PhD in history from the Babeș-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 Bucharest-based publishing house. Barbu was the Dean of the Political Science Department of the University of Bucharest from 1994 to 2000 and from 2002 to 2004, and Chair of the Department since 2004.

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.

In 2004, the European Anti-fraud Office (OLAF) notified the Romanian Government about irregularities found in a Phare programme headed by Barbu, as Dean of the Faculty of Political Science. The event was reported by an article on the BBC Romanian service on 5 May^[1] and appeared in the Daily Bulletin of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs a day later.^[2] According to both sources, the program engulfed over 200,000 euros coming from PHARE TEMPUS grant money into civil servant training courses which never took place and which had nonexistent people enrolled. In an interview during the 2012 Parliament election campaign, as candidate from the Social-Liberal Union, Daniel Barbu dubbed the event as a misunderstanding and a "no penal matter".^[3] As a result of the 2012 Romanian parliamentary elections, Barbu was designated the new Romanian Minister of Culture by the same person who in 2004 headed the Government's Control Department, Victor Ponta, a department which investigated the OLAF notifications.