2023-2024 (current fellows)

Spiros Chairetis: 'Reading' Old Greek Television Fiction Online (How Audiences Respond to Gender- and Weight-diverse TV Shows of the Past on Social Media Platforms)

This project builds on the work I conducted during my doctoral studies based on my (re)reading of popular 1990s and 2000s Greek television comedy texts through the lens of queer, gender and genre studies to challenge the exclusively homophobic, misogynistic and conservative ideologies upon which these texts are assumed to have lied. Moving away from questions of representation and hypothetical viewership, my current work concentrates on reception practices, exploring how audiences interact and assess the dialectic of diversity and/or hegemonic discourses in past television shows, particularly concerning gender, sexuality and fatness. Drawing on netnographic findings (i.e. comments published on YouTube videos of Greek television shows and posts by fans on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and/or personal blogs), I will examine the history of past television shows and explore ways in which they are passed down to different interpretative communities and have become sites of critique, resilient remembrance and even dispute during the #MeToo/(post-)pandemic era. An analysis of this kind aims to reveal how the traditionally silent voices of fans and online audiences can not only add significantly original thought concerning the reception of television fiction to the academic community but also open up and diversify dialogue with the wider television/media landscape. 

Spiros Chairetis (DPhil, Oxford University 2021) is currently (2023) a postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Communication, Media, and Culture at Panteion University and will be Marilena Laskaridis Visiting Fellow at the University of Amsterdam in the spring semester of 2024. He co-edited the special issue Introduction to Greek Television Studies: (Re)Reading Greek Television Fiction Since 1989 (2019) and wrote the poetry collection Ο γοργόνος & άλλα πλάσματα / The merman & other creatures (Thraca, June 2023). He is finishing a monograph titled Greek Television Comedy: Resilient Texts, Queer Readings. His current research focuses on queer theory, the relationship between Greek television fiction and its audiences, and the consumption of past television texts through different social media platforms.

Carl Mauzy: German occupation photography in WWII Greece. An examination

The project looks at the photography taken by German soldiers during Germany’s occupation of Greece in 1941-1944. Such photography is an underexplored aspect of Greece’s World War II social and cultural history, that has only recently begun to be explored. To pursue this project, I will look at the photographic archive of Karl Rauscher which is housed at the NIOD in Amsterdam. Rauscher was a member of the Luftwaffe stationed in Greece during WWII. Rauscher photographed extensively during his stay in Greece, documenting the daily routine of the German occupiers, visits to archaeological sites as well as the Greeks he encountered. By studying Rauscher’s war time pictures of Greece, I will investigate what place such images can have in the historical narratives and cultural memory of Greece, and more broadly in the historiography of WWII, taking into account the visual practices of the perpetrator. Furthermore, I will examine how the amateur nature of Rauscher’s photographs might allow us to examine these images as instantiations of multiple histories, beyond a dichotomy of perpetrator/victim. 

Carl Mauzy holds a PhD from King’s College London, where he studied photographic visualizations of collective identities in Greece during the first half of the twentieth century. Previously he worked as a producer and curator at the National Museums of World Culture in Sweden. His academic research focuses on visual approaches to history, photography’s role in historical imagination, and the history of modern Greece.

2022-2023

Yannis Stamos: Culture and Pro-Axis Propaganda at the Athens Radio Station (1941-1944)

This project explores discourses on culture disseminated by the Athens Radio Station during the Axis Occupation of Greece. The aim is to analyze the main ways in which “culture” was instrumentalized in order to provide legitimacy to the occupying forces and the Greek collaborationist governments. The project is part of broader research on Pro-Axis Radio Propaganda in Greece during the Occupation (1941-1944). It builds on my earlier research on the political function of cultural initiatives and culture-related discourses promoted by the Metaxas dictatorship (1936-1941), shifting the focus onto a hitherto understudied medium, that of the radio. The virtual lack of extant audio material from this period is partly made up for through the use of transcripts of radio broadcasts found in the Greek press from 1941 to 1944. The project argues that, apart from controlling the print media, Occupation authorities sought to establish a monophonic soundscape in Greece, with radio policy being part of a struggle to suppress dissent and justify the foreign occupation. Discourses on culture played a crucial role, framing WWII as a struggle between civilization and barbarism and placing the Axis on the side of the former.

Yannis Stamos obtained his first degree from the University of Thessaloniki and his PhD from the University of Birmingham. He has held teaching and research positions at the Universities of Birmingham, Vienna, and Princeton. He is currently finishing a book project titled Culture and/as Politics: The Intellectuals and Ideology of the 4th-of-August Regime in Greece (1936-1941). His research interests lie at the intersection of culture and politics with a special focus on intellectual and cultural history during the first half of the twentieth century.

Eleni Papargyriou: Modern Greek Literature in the Digital Age: Lessons from Times of Crisis

This project sets out to investigate the rapport of Modern Greek literature with digital media in times of social crisis. Working within the participatory and interactive framework of Web 2.0., literary output published in social media outlets (mainly Facebook, Instagram and YouTube) and blogs during the Greek fiscal crisis of 2010-2018 and the first year of the Covid pandemic will be analysed to look at the ways in which digital literary products conceptualise political and social phenomena and intervene in public political and cultural discourses. The main aim is tripartite: to observe and comment on modulations of literary output produced in digital media and its generic hybridity (from ‘pure’ genres such as poetry to various hybrid forms of life-writing, fiction and social critique), to examine literary responses to vital social subjects and investigate to what extent these responses are tailored by the specificities of the medium itself. The goal is to trace critical thought on digital media produced in Greece, particularly as a reflective comment on novel digital opportunities and challenges presented to the literary market.

Eleni Papargyriou is currently teaching at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Hellenic Open University. She has held teaching and research positions at the University of Patras, the University of Vienna, King’s College London, Oxford University and Princeton University. She has published the monograph Reading Games in the Greek Novel (2011) and co-edited the volumes Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities (2015), Greece in British Women’s Literary Imagination 1913-2013 (2017) and the special issues Cavafy Pop: Readings of C.P. Cavafy in Popular Culture (2015) and ‘1821’: Mediation, Reception, Archive (2021). Her current work focuses on modernism, intercultural literary relations and the relationship between literary text and photographic imagery. She is Associate Editor of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture, taking over as Principal Editor with Vassiliki Kolocotroni (University of Glasgow) from January 2023.

2021-2022

Alexander Kazamias: Sound National Convictions: Anticommunist discourse and propaganda in post-war Greece, 1944-74
Interview with Alexander

This project investigates the intellectual history of anticommunism in Greece from the Civil War of the 1940s to the fall of the Military Dictatorship in 1974.  Using a variety of textual and visual sources (pamphlets, speeches, government papers, radio broadcasts, schoolbooks, posters, and newsreels) it examines how state anticommunism shaped post-war Greek culture and politics through a combination of public order policies, official propaganda, and covert politicization of the education system.  Emphasis is placed on locating post-war Greek history in the context of the Cold War and unveiling the internal sociocultural divisions and emotional regimes of fear generated by anticommunism, including its suspensory effects on the country’s modernization and democratization. The study is set in a comparative perspective, drawing parallels and contrasts with other varieties of anticommunism in Western Europe and North America.  

Alexander Kazamias held the Fellowship while being Senior Lecturer and Course Director in Politics at Coventry University. He is the author of Greece and the Cold War: Diplomacy, Rivalry and Anti-Colonialism after the Civil Conflict. He has written extensively on modern Greek history and politics, Greek-Turkish relations, and the history and politics of Egypt.

Dimitris Soudias: Towards a cultural economy of uncertainty: creativity and entrepreneurialism in Athens and Berlin
Interview with Dimitris

”You have to be creative. Because you don’t know what tomorrow will be like. But I cannot be creative because of the stress,” a young Athenian entrepreneur told me. My project picks up on this anecdotal cue to investigate how social entrepreneurs in Athens and Berlin imagine and confront uncertainty and the future, and the role of “creativity” in this regard. Against the backdrop of austerity and COVID-19, the Social Economy sector is seen as central by policy-makers to address and mitigate the impacts of these crises on the economy and society (OECD, 2020). Here, social entrepreneurs play an analytically puzzling role: they are profiting from the deregulation of previously state-held responsibilities of social protection by managing social provision. Simultaneously, they are themselves subject to uncertainty and in need of protection. The Laskaridis Fellowship allows me to develop this project to full grant application maturity, in order to scrutinize the ways in which entrepreneurial imaginaries of the future and uncertainty are changing in pandemic times.

Dimitris Soudias held the Fellowship as HBA Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the London School of Economics. In his doctoral dissertation (Philipps-Universität Marburg, 2019), he investigated the formation of political subjectivity against the backdrop of crisis and austerity in Greece.

2020-2021

Nikolas Kakkoufa: ‘Word is the flesh’: The Homosexual Body in the Work of Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and C.P. Cavafy

This project seeks to develop a transatlantic and interdisciplinary model for studying the way the queer body is constructed in the work of three major writers: Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), and C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933). Through a comparative reading of works by these three authors, the project traces not only what seem to be continuities within the history of queer writing but also ruptures, as they materialize in these writers’ work. It also examines whether the shift in discourse from sexuality as act to sexuality as identity limits the ways in which the homosexual body itself is allowed to perform in their writings. An analysis of the work of these three writers against a Greek background reveals how the complexity of Cavafy’s example might function as a model for understanding cultural explorations of the queer body not only in modern Greece but also in authors from neighboring geographical areas that Cavafy has influenced with his work.

Nikolas P. Kakkoufa (PhD, King’s College London 2015) held the Fellowship while being Lecturer in Modern Greek at the Department of Classics, the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Program in Hellenic Studies, and an Affiliate Faculty at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University, New York. His courses range from beginners to advanced classes in language and culture and seminars on literature and sexuality. His research projects focus on queer theory, on the image of the city in literature, and on the use of literature and translation pedagogy in second language acquisition.

Despina Lalaki: Digging for Democracy in Greece: Intra-Civilizational Processes During the American Century

This book project investigates the American role in the formulation of Modern Greek cultural and political identities. To this effect, Digging for Democracy focuses on the field of archaeology as a privileged place in the history of the Greek nation-state and Western civilization at large and central nod in a complex network of trans-national institutional and intellectual relations. The book argues that American policies of economic liberalism and capitalist democracy invested symbolically in Hellenism – this complex relationship between Western modernity and Greek antiquity – radically transforming it in the process. Once employed as a critique of the effects of modern civilization – primarily informed by German visions of self-improvement, disinterested Wissenschaft and cultural reform – Hellenism became an expression of instrumental rationality, cultural commodification, and liberal capitalist democracy. The book aims to deepen our knowledge on the relationship between the two polities, Greece and the United States, placing emphasis on intellectuals and cultural experts, socio-political elites, the role of philanthropic, not-for-profit organizations, and various cultural and educational programs. A sociology of archaeology and an archaeology of the Greek state, the study follows in the tradition of historical sociology, conducting large-scale comparative historical analysis over a long-time span while trying to identify important moments of historical change that affect social structures. To this day, the project maintains, “the cradle of democracy” conditions our cultural dispositions and political imagination. The inability to perceive alternative modes of political and social organization is intrinsically connected with identities which are far from immanent or as primordial as they appear.

Despina Lalaki is a sociologist who works in the areas of historical and cultural sociology, social theory, American and Modern Greek Studies. She is particularly interested in long-term social and cultural changes, changing modes of consciousness, the ideological and cultural foundations of the state and the role of intellectuals. At the New School University she completed her Ph.D. in Sociology while she has also studied History of Art and Architecture at SUNY-Binghamton University (M.A.) and Archaeology and Art History at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece (B.A.). Her publications include several articles in collective volumes and peer-reviewed journals while she often writes for non-academic audiences.

Emilia Salvanou: Social movements and memory: the case of the Greek Sixties

How does memory fuel social movements and how does it contribute to the shaping of visions of the future? The question lately occupies the attention of scholars, who have expanded their interest from the issue of memory of social movements to that of memory in social movements. My research project will explore the interrelation between memory and social movements in the case of the Greek Sixties, focusing on the early period that preceded the dictatorship of 1967. More specifically, it will explore how the contentious politics of the period were based on the strands of cultural and memory activism. Moreover, it will explore the interrelation between the national and transnational aspects of the movement and trace how the intersection of the national and the transnational, of the political and the cultural, of the past and the envisaged future, contributed to the gradual overcoming of the post-civil war truth regime and the emergence of a new historical culture that was in accordance with a more inclusive and democratic society. Although in the case of Greece memory had a special gravity in the post-war condition because of the Civil War that followed the end of the Occupation, memory regimes were renegotiated more or less across the social movements of the Sixties, both as part of closing open deals with “their own” national past, and as part of the shaping of a new global mental map that would be in accordance with the revolutionary future that the movements’ aspired in a transnational scale. In this sense, the research on Greece falls into the intersection of various research fields, such as memory and historical culture studies, social movements’ studies, the study of the global sixties, and that of the New Cold War History.

Emilia Salvanou studied History at the University of Athens, obtained her PhD from the University of Aegean (2006), and completed her post-doctoral thesis at the University of Athens (2012). She has participated in various research projects with national and European funding and has lectured on Greek History (University of Thessaloniki), European History, and Public History (Hellenic Open University). She has published extensively in journals and edited volumes on topics of contemporary history, migration and refugeehood, memory, public history, and historical culture.

2019-2020

Kristina Gedgaudaite: Smyrna in your Pocket: Memory of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture

This project turns to a watershed in the history of modern Greece – its defeat in the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) and the population exchange that followed – as remembered in present-day Greece. On the one hand, it describes how family memories find their way into cultural representations and provide a language as well as a form for other reminiscences. On the other hand, it aims to show how those cultural representations participate in wider transformations that occur in the public sphere. Methodological tools developed in the field of cultural memory studies are coupled with insights drawn from history, psychology and anthropology. Within this interdisciplinary framework, the memory of Asia Minor emerges as reflective of present-day ideologies and responsive to contemporary concerns.

Kristina Gedgaudaite completed her doctorate thesis at the University of Oxford, where she worked on the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) and the exchange of the Greek-Turkish populations in 1923. Through a number of case studies and different media — including history textbook, documentary film, graphic novel and theatre performance — she discussed how memories of these events are transmitted at the time when witnesses remain a few. Her general research interests fall within the fields of cultural memory and refugee studies.

Pafsanias Karathanasis: Prolonged crisis and permanent liminality: A study of the relations between Greece and Cyprus through shared experiences of sociopolitical crisis

In this project, the various sociopolitical and cultural interconnections between Greece and Cyprus are examined, with a particular focus on how relations between Greeks and Greek-Cypriots are shaped, transformed and negotiated through recent experiences of “crisis.” Building on fieldwork conducted in Nicosia, the divided Cypriot capital, the project explores a paradox in the relationship between Greece and Cyprus. While it is believed by the majority of both Greeks and Greek-Cypriots that they share the same nationality, they do not share the same citizenship. However, Greece has historically been understood by Greek-Cypriots as the “motherland”, as Turkey has been for Turkish-Cypriots. This metaphor has created a cultural imbalance between Cyprus and its “motherlands”. However, while in north Cyprus (the unrecognized “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”) Turkey’s cultural, political and military hegemony is obvious, in south Cyprus (the Republic of Cyprus) the idea of Greece as culturally superior is alive in more subtle ways. The goal of the project is to examine the extent to which lived experiences and the changes that the “crisis” brings to the livelihoods of people have transformed the ways Greeks see Greek-Cypriots, and vice versa.

Pafsanias Karathanasis is a social anthropologist. He holds a BA in social anthropology from Panteion University in Athens, an MA in Material and Visual Culture from University College London, and a PhD in historical and social anthropology from the University of the Aegean in Greece. His research interests include anthropology of space and place, visual culture and political anthropology, while he is specifically interested in urban cultures, grassroots initiatives, and contested landscapes in cities. He has done research on urban practices such as street art and political activism, and he has worked with political and artistic grassroots initiatives in Athens and Nicosia.