Despina Lalaki

Candidate statement

Despina Lalaki (incumbent) is a sociologist who works in the areas of historical and cultural sociology, social theory, American Studies and Modern Greek Studies. She teaches as Adjunct Associate Professor at the City University of New York-CUNY. She has held the Laskaridis Visiting Research Fellowship in Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam (2020-2021) and the M. Alison Frantz Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (2019-2020). Her publications include articles in collective volumes and peer-reviewed journals while she also writes for non-academic audiences. She is the co-editor of the volume The Battle of Ideas. Cultural Cold War and the Making of Liberal Democracy in Greece (Ψηφίδες, forthcoming 2023) and she currently works on a monograph entitled Digging for Democracy in Greece. Intra-Civilizational Processes During the American Century (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming). Lalaki has held teaching and research positions at CUNY, NYU and the New School University, where she earned her Ph.D. in sociology. She has also studied History of Art and Architecture at SUNY-Binghamton (M.A.) and Archaeology and Art History at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece (B.A.). She is an elected member of the MGSA Executive Board (2020-23), member of the Editorial Collective of Situations: The Journal of the Radical Imagination and founding member of the Collective Decolonize Hellas.