Mitsos Bilalis

Speaker

Mitsos Bilalis is a Lecturer in Theory and Technology of Historical Information at the University of Thessaly, Department of History, Archaeology, Social Anthropology (Volos, Greece). He received his PhD in History from the Faculty of History, University of Sofia, Bulgaria. He has published articles on studying history and historiography in the digital domain. His current interests are in digital media and representations of the past, uses of the past on the Net and in social history of information.

Hédi Bouraoui

Speaker

Hédi Bouraoui is Professor of Literature and founder of the Canada- Maghreb Centre at York University. His special interests are contemporary critical theory, and post-colonial Francophone literatures, including North African and Caribbean. His many publications in these fields include The Critical Strategy (1983). He is also a published poet and novelist, including La Composée , La Femme d'entre les lign es   and La Littérature franco-ontarienne. Etat des lieux , .

Luigi Cajani

Speaker

Luigi Cajani is Professor of History Didactics at the Facoltà di Scienze Umanistiche of the University “La Sapienza” in Rome and at the SSIS Lazio ( Teachers Training Postgraduate School ). He is member of the Wissenschaftlicher Ausschuß of the Georg-Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforscuhng in Braunschweig ( Germany ), and member of the Board of the International Society for History Didactics.

Efrosini Camatsos

Speaker

Efrosini Camatsos teaches at Panteion University in Athens. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include 19th and 20th century Greek literature and women's writing.

Yiorgos Chouliaras

Speaker

Yiorgos Chouliaras is the author of five volumes of poetry in Greek and numerous essays and other contributions on literature, cultural history, and international relations. He received degrees from Reed College and the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research. He was a founding editor of the influential Greek literary reviews Tram and Hartis and an editor of the Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora and other literary and scholarly periodicals in the United States. In 2003, he was elected to the Executive Board of the Hellenic Authors’ Society and he serves as Vice President for international relations .

Charitini Christodoulou

Speaker

Charitini Christodoulou is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham, U.K. Her thesis on Nikos Kazantzakis's novel The Last Temptation , examines aspects of how the novel has been interpreted by literary critics. Her research concentrates on theories of literature and psychoanalysis, and how these relate to or enlighten the reality outside the world of books.

Eleftheria Deltsou

Speaker

Eleftheria Deltsou is a social anthropologist and teaches at the History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology Department of the University of Thessaly. She received her PhD in anthropology at Indiana University. Her research and academic interests include the politics of culture and the past in the context of nationalism, tourism, and the E.U., as well as theoretical and other conceptualizations of “tradition” and “modernity.”

Christina Dokou

Speaker

Christina Dokou is a Lecturer in Comparative and American Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Faculty of English Studies. Her areas of interest, on which she has lectured and published both in Greece and abroad, include gender studies (especially androgyny), myth in modern literature, and pop Americana.

Bessie Dendrinos

Chair

Bessie Dendrinos [Vassiliki Dendrinou] is Professor of Sociology of Language and Foreign Language Education at the Department of Language and Linguistics, Faculty of English Studies, University of Athens. Her research interests are mainly concerned with the marketised discourses of foreign language didactics and European policies for foreign language teaching and assessment, and her most recent book, The Hegemony of English (in collaboration with Donaldo Macedo and Panagiota Gounari) won the 2004 American Educational Studies Association Critic’s Choice Award.

Maria Efthymiou is Assistant Professor of Modern Greek History in the Department of History and Archeology at the University of Athens . She has received degrees from the University of Athens and the Sorbonne. Her doctoral thesis " Rhodes et sa region elargie; les activites portuaires" was published in 1988. Ηer most recent book is Εβραίοι και Χριστιανοί στα τουρκοκρατουμένα νησιά του Νοτιοανατολικού Αιγαίου. Οι δύσκολες πλευρές μιάς γόνιμης συνύπραξης .

Thomas Gallant

Chair

Thomas Gallant holds the Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair and is Professor of Modern Greek History at York University. He received his PhD in Classical Archaeology from Cambridge University. His most recently published books are Modern Greece, Experiencing Dominion: Cultural Identity and Power in the British Mediterranean, and The 1918 Anti-Greek Riot in Toronto. He is the current President of the Modern Greek Studies Association. Along with Professor Antonis Liakos, he is co-organizer of the York University- University of Athens conference series on the Mediterranean.

Anna Gamberini is a Ph.D Candidate in Archaeology at the University of Bologna , where she is working on a project on archaeological sites in Southern Albania (IV-I century BC). She has been working on the structures and materials recently found in Teoderico’s villa in Ravenna, and has taken part in several archaeological excavations in Italy (Marzabotto, BO; Galeata, FC, Pompei, NA) and elsewhere (Alésia , Bourgogne ; Phoinike , Albania ). She is a member of the Phoinike research group, especially in charge of the study and classification of objects.

Effi Gazi is a Lecturer in the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly, Greece. Her fields of interest include history and theory of historiography, intellectual history, public history, and nationalism. Her most recent publication is Ο δεύτερος βίος των Τριών Ιεραρχών. Μια γενεαλογία του «ελληνοχριστιανικού πολιτισμού» (Athens 2004).

Nikoletta Giantzi is a Lecturer in the Department of History and Archeology at the National and Capodistrian University of Athens. In 1993, she received a Ph. D. in Medieval History from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Among her publications are Mediterranean Trade and commercial Activity in the early medieval era (V-IXs. ), The Syrian merchants in the West, during the Merovingian Period , The ‘Beguines’ movement as a marginal phenomenon in the medieval town, and The eastern Schisme and the Cluniac Reform .

Asli Igsiz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature at the University
of Michigan. Her dissertation examines the politics of recognition through an interdisciplinary cultural analysis of collective memory and particularly the role of cultural products in making individual stories public --most often a claim for recognition.She studies this process through the Greek-Turkish population exchange.

Pavlos Kavouras is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnomusicology in the Faculty of Music Studies at the University of Athens. He has done field research mainly in Karpathos, Lesbos, Thrace, and Macedonia. His most recent publications include: "The past of the present: From the ethnography and performance of music to the performance of music ethnography" (in Greek), "The biography of a folk musician: ethnographic field research, interpretation and fiction" (Greek and English), The anthropology of music  (A collection of essays, in Greek).

Thanos Koulos received a BA in Political Science from the University of Cyprus and an MSc in Nationalism and Ethnicity from the LSE; he is currently a PhD candidate in the department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, King's College, London.

Theodore Koutsogiannis is an art historian whose fields of interest include the influence of Classical antiquity on the visual culture of modern European civilisation. He received a BA for the University of Athens, where he is completing his PhD thesis on the drawings of Cyriacus of Ancona. He has attended seminars in Rome (La Sapienza), London (Warburg Institute) and Pisa (Scuola Normale Superiore). He is the co-editor of the Greek-language catalogue of the exhibition In the light of Apollo: Italian Renaissance and Greece (National Gallery, Athens 2004).

Ioanna Laliotou is Lecturer in Contemporary History and Intercultural Relations in the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly . She received degrees from the University of Athens (BA), Birmingham University (M.Soc.Sc.), and the European University Institute in Italy (Ph.D.). Her research interests concern the history of contemporary migrations, the history of subjectivity, and cultural theory and criticism. She is author of Transatlantic Subjects: Acts of Migration and Culture of Transnationalism between Europe and America . She is also member of the editorial committee of the academic journal Historein .

Elena Lamberti is Adjunct Professor of Anglo-American Literature at the University of Bologna. Her fields of research include Modernism, technology and literature, cultural memory.She specializes in English and Canadian Literature, and has published extensively on English and Anglo-American Modernism, as well as on Anglo-Canadian culture of the late 20 th century. She is the author Marshall McLuhan, Tra letteratura, arti e media , editor of Interpreting/Translating European Modernism and co-author of Il senso critico. Saggi di Ford Madox Ford , Ford Madox Ford and the Republic of Letters .

Irad Malkin holds the Maxwell Cummings Family Chair for Mediterranean History and Cultures and is Professor of Ancient Greek History at Tel Aviv University where he directs the Center for Mediterranean Civilizations Project and co-edits the Mediterranean Historical Review. His books include Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece ; Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean; The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity; Ethnicity and Identity in Ancient Greece.

Luciano Marrocu is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Cagliari (Italy). For many years he studied the British Labour Party and Fabian movements, His most recent works deals, besides British Labour history, with Sardinian culture and society in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Jacopo Masi is a Ph.D Candidate in Literatures of the United Europe. He graduated with a dissertation on time and space in Philip Larkin’s poetry. He has been working on the role of memory in Twentieth-century European poetry. He cooperates with the Centro di Poesia Contemporanea (Centre for Contemporary Poetry) in Bologna.

Alexandra Nocke read Cultural Studies at the University of Hildesheim, Germany, and studied in the USA and Israel. She is currently completing her PhD on Mediterraneanism as a scholarship-holder at the DFG graduate seminar “Makom – Place and Places in Judaism” at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for Jewish-European Studies (Potsdam University/ Germany) in association with the Center for Mediterranean Civilizations Project at Tel Aviv University.

David Ohana teaches European history at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and is Senior Researcher at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute at Sede-Boqer. He was the founder and the first academic director of the Forum for Mediterranean Cultures at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. His books include: The Order of the Nihilists, A Humanist in the Sun: Camus and the Mediterranean Inspiration, The Promethean Passion, and The Anger of the Intellectuals. Prof. Ohana has also edited for the Israeli reader books by Rousseau, Camus, Memmi and others.

Penelope Papailias is lecturer in social anthropology in the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan. Her book, Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan; the dissertation on which the book is based was the recipient of the Modern Greek Studies Association Best Dissertation Prize, 2001.

Nicholas Potamitis received a PhD from the University of Birmingham on the subject of Greek Popular Film in the Fifties. He has taught Film Studies at the University of Warwick and currently works in the National Library of the British Film Institute. He has spoken on the subject of Greek popular cinema at international conferences in Cambridge, Paris, London and Stockholm.

Adrian Shubert is Professor of Modern European History and Associate Vice-President International at York University. He received degrees from the University of Toronto (BA), the University of New Mexico (MA), the University of Warwick (MA), and the University of London (PhD). Professor Shubert’s research interests focus on European social history, in particular the history of Spain. Most recently he published Death and Money in the Afternoon: A History of Spanish Bullfighting , which is also being published in Spanish. His previous books include A Social History of Modern Spain and The Road to Revolution in Spain.In 1999 in recognition of his scholarly achievements King Juan Carlos of Spain appointed him a Commander of the Order of Civil Merit.

Roumiana Stantcheva is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Institute for Balkans Studies with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) and part time Associate Professor at the Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridsky". Among her publications are: Modern Rumanian Poetry in a Comparative Approach , (In Bulgarian, with an abstract in French), L’Europe, la France , les Balkans: littératures balkaniques et littératures and Reception of Balkan Literatures in Bulgaria (In Bulgarian). She is the current President of the Bulgarian Academic Circle of Comparative Literature.

Lauren E. Talalay is the Associate Director and Curator at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan; and Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Classical Studies (also U of M). She is an archaeologist who specializes in the Neolithic of Greece and has published primarily on the use of the human body as a symbol, gender, and figurines in Greek prehistory.

Odette Varon-Vassard teaches Greek History in the Hellenic Open University (EAP). She received her PhD in Contemporary history from the University of Athens. The title of her dissertation is "Youth Organizations of Resistance to Nazi occupation in Greece, 1941-1944". Her current research focuses on the history of European Jews, and in particular issues related to identity, the holocaust, and the literature of the concentration camps.

Vassiliki Yiakoumaki is an anthropologist and teaches in the Deptartment of Social Anthropology at Panteion University, Athens. She received her PhD at the New School for Social Research, New York. She is working on issues of official politics of multiculturalism and politics of heritage in the EU, European identity construction processes, and consumption. She is currently conducting research for “Mediterranean Voices”, a research program funded by the European Union’s Euromed Heritage II, with the aim to create an ethnographic data base on “oral history and cultural practice in Mediterranean urban spaces.”