Maria Kaliambou

Candidate statement

Maria Kaliambou is Senior Lector II and the Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Hellenic Studies Program at Yale. She earned her BA in History and Archaeology from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and her PhD in Folklore and European Ethnol¬ogy from Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. She held postdoctoral fellowships at the University Charles-de-Gaulle in Lille and Prince¬ton University. Her research focuses on the dialogue between folklore and book history, both in Greece and the diaspora. She is also engaged in Modern Greek language pedagogy. She has been the Chair of the Modern Greek Special Interest Group at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and is an Oral Proficiency Interview tester for Modern Greek. She has received numerous ac¬colades, including the Lutz Röhrich Prize for the best dissertation in oral literature (2006) and the Vassiliki Karagiannaki Best Edited Book Prize in Modern Greek Studies from the Modern Greek Studies Association (2024). In 2011, the European Commission recognized her as Greece’s Erasmus Student Ambassador. Her publications include Home – Faith – Family: Transmission of Values in Greek Popular Booklets of Tales (1870–1970) (2006, in German), The Routledge Modern Greek Reader. Greek Folktales for Learning Modern Greek (2015), and the award-winning The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States (2023, in English and Greek).