Faculty Board Member

Othon Alexandrakis is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at York University. His research and publications explore cultural processes of change, micro-social responses to conditions of shared hardship, the politics of knowledge, transnational migration and childhoods, and ethnographic methods. He has over fifteen years of ethnographic research experience in Greece, primarily among undocumented migrants, anti-establishment youth, the Roma community (commonly known as Gypsies), and unaccompanied refugee children. Alexandrakis is currently engaged in two research projects, the first as single-investigator exploring political agency among unaccompanied migrant youth titled Critical Humanitarianism: Precarious Pathways and Disruptive Sanctuary in Greece, and the second as co-investigator on an international interdisciplinary research team examining how liminal life shapes migrant child well-being and developmental trajectories titled Exploring the Impact of Protracted Displacement: War-affected Refuge Children in Greece, Israel and Kenya. He has published seven articles in leading journals, three chapters, is the editor of Impulse to Act: A new Anthropology of Resistance and Social Justice (2016), and author of Radical Resilience: Athenian Topographies of Precarity and Possibility (2022).

Lissi Athanasiou-Krikelis is Associate Professor of English, in the Humanities department, and director of Interdisciplinary Studies at New York Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on postmodern metafiction in both children’s and adult fiction, often weaving contemporary Greek literature. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, The Lion and the Unicorn, Children’s Literature Quarterly, Bookbird, International Research in Children’s Literature and Narrative. She is currently working on an edited collection on metafiction, under contract with Routledge. At New York Institute of Technology, Athanasiou-Krikelis has taken up various leadership roles. In addition to serving on the Senate regularly and being in the leadership team for the restructuring of her institution’s general education curriculum, she is now leading the university’s efforts to organize an assessment plan of the general education courses. Athanasiou-Krikelis would be honored to serve on the MGSA executive board if elected.

Sakis Gekas (incumbent) (ΒΑ History, Ionian University; ΜΑ, Ph.D. History, University of Essex) joined York University as the Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair in 2009-10 teaching history of Modern Greece (including the summer abroad course in Greece), Greek migration and diaspora in the 20th century and courses in Mediterranean and European history. Sakis has published Xenocracy. State, Class and Colonialim in the Ionian Islands 1815-1864 (Berghahn 2017), and articles in Mediterranean Historical Review, the European Review of History, Historein, Ίστωρ and Μνήμων. In 2012 he co-founded the Greek Canadian History Project and helped ‘build’ the virtual museum of Greek immigration to Canada (Immigrec). Sakis served at the MGSA Executive Board in 2011-17 as chair of the Digital Communications and Social Media committee, and member (2013) and chair (2015) of the Symposium program committee; if elected again to the MGSA Executive Board, Sakis will be honored to contribute to the Publications committee and the Transnational Studies committee, help again with the organization of the Symposium, and overall represent Toronto and Canada at the MGSA and promote the goals of the Association.

Eugenia Georges is Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. Her research interests focus on the medicalization and demedicalization of reproduction and, more specifically, on the processes through which understandings of pregnancy and obstetrical practices in Greece have been shaped in interaction with a variety of reproductive technologies. She is the author of two books, Bodies of Knowledge: The Medicalization of Reproduction in Greece (Vanderbilt University Press), and The Making of a Transnational Community: Development and Cultural Change in the Dominican Republic (Columbia University Press). With James Faubion and Gonda van Steen, she co-edited “Greece is Burning,” a special issue of Cultural Anthropology, and with Chrisy Moutsatsos, “Re-visiting Sex and Gender in Contemporary Greek Ethnography, a special issue of the Journal of Mediterranean Studies. Her most recent project examines Greek medical education and the training of medical students and residents in obstetrics.

Franklin L. Hess is the Director of the Institute for European Studies and the Coordinator of the Modern Greek Program at Indiana University, where he holds the rank of Senior Lecturer. His research focuses on film, television, popular culture, and food studies. Hess has served multiple terms on the Executive Board of the MGSA and has served as both Secretary and President of the organization. He has participated three times on the Program Committee of the MGSA Symposium, including as co-chair in 2017. He also chaired the Local Arrangements Committee when Indiana University Bloomington hosted the Symposium in 2013. Though not currently on the Executive Board, Hess continues to be actively involved in the organization, serving on the Undergraduate Studies Committee and the Innovation Grant Committee and chairing the Financial Advisory Committee.

April Kalogeropoulos Householder, Ph.D., is the director of Undergraduate Research and Prestigious Scholarships at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). April holds degrees in film production, art history, and comparative literature, and has taught courses in film and media studies, and gender and women’s studies. In 2006, she completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Film Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation included the production of a documentary film about Bouboulina entitled, The Brave Stepped Back: The Life and Times of Laskarina Bouboulina, which premiered at the Armata Festival in Spetses, Greece, and is collected by the Hellenic Museum and Cultural Center in Chicago, Illinois, as well as many universities, libraries, and Greek Orthodox parishes world-wide. In 2016, April published her first book, Feminist Perspectives on Orange Is the New Black: Thirteen Critical Essays, and has published several other recent book chapters on intersectional feminist media history and theory. Her chapter on Baltimore’ radical feminists of the 1970s appears in Baltimore Revisited (2019). Her most recent publication is “Representations of Women in Greek American Films about the Greek Revolution” in The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in North America (Η ελληνική Επανάσταση και η ελληνική διασπορά στη Βόρεια Αμερική. Maria Kaliambou, ed. Athens: Asini, 2022). Her chapter, “Greek American Feminist Artists: Radical Traditions”, with Kostis Kourelis (Franklin & Marshall College), is forthcoming. Also forthcoming in May, 2023 is her edited volume, Bouboulina and the Greek Revolution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Heroine of 1821 (Lexington/Rowman and Littlefield). Her research interests include modern Greece and comparative media and identity politics.

Neovi M. Karakatsanis (incumbent) is a Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science and Director of the Honors Program at Indiana University South Bend. Her work has appeared in South European Society and Politics, Armed Forces and Society, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Democratization, and Mediterranean Quarterly. She is the author of The Politics of Elite Transformation: The Consolidation of Greek Democracy in Theoretical Perspective and of American Foreign Policy towards the Colonels’ Greece: Uncertain Allies and the 1967 Coup d’État (with Jonathan Swarts). She has served as coeditor of the Journal of Political and Military Sociology and is currently a book review editor of Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters. A former President, Vice President, and Secretary of the Modern Greek Studies Association who has served in numerous other positions, including as Local Arrangements Chair and Program Committee Co-Chair for several MGSA Symposia, she will serve the MGSA and its members with enthusiasm.

Katerina Lagos is Professor of History and Director of the Angelo K. Tsakopoulos Hellenic Studies Program at California State University, Sacramento. She is a modern Greek historian with expertise in the interwar period, minorities, education, fascism, dictatorships, and Jewish history. She has published several book chapters and articles, including “Forced Assimilation or Emigration: Sephardic Jewry in Thessaloniki, 1917–1941" (2015)”, "Interwar Greece: Its Generals, a Republic, and the monarchy" (2020) and "Patterns of Uncontrolled Borrowing and Defaults: Contextualizing the Greek Economic Crises of 1843, 1893, and 2010” (2021). Her book publications include a co-edited volume with Othon Anastasakis, The Greek Military Dictatorship 1967-1974: Revisiting a Troubled Past (Berghahn, 2021), a monograph entitled The Fourth of August Regime and Greek Jewry, 1936-1941 (Palgrave, 2023), and is currently working on a second co-edited volume with Christine Philliou entitled The Greek Revolution: Ottoman Transits and the Modern World. From 2016-2022, Katerina was the social sciences book review editor for the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. Additionally, Katerina served on the MGSA Executive Board from 2014-2020, and was Vice-President from 2017-2020. In 2019, Katerina hosted the MGSA international symposium in Sacramento, California. She is especially proud of securing a $20,000 grant to bring international participants to the 2019 MGSA symposium in Sacramento. She strongly supports junior scholars and enjoys organizing academic conferences.

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.

Panayotis League (incumbent) is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas at Florida State University, where he teaches graduate courses on ethnographic and archival theory and practice; music, dance, and oral poetry in Greece and the Balkans; the construction and performance of race and ethnicity in diasporic contexts; and creative non-fiction writing. He also directs performance ensembles and is an active composer, performer, and recording artist, and in 2019 was named a Master Artist by the Florida Folklife Program for his work preserving and disseminating the traditional music and poetry of the island of Kalymnos. Dr. League has published widely on performance practice among musicians, dancers, and poets throughout Greece and her diaspora, including articles in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, the Journal of Greek Media and Culture, and Ethnomusicology, and his monograph Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-Sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora -- which examines the cultural and memorial politics of musicking among the descendants of Anatolian refugees on Lesvos and in the Boston area -- was published in 2021 by University of Michigan Press. As a longtime member and current Chair of the Transnational Studies Committee, as well as current member of the Executive Board, Dr. League has advocated for a more nuanced and focused engagement with the pressing theoretical and practical issues and challenges confronting scholars of Hellenism living and working in diaspora, and is committed to deepening the MGSA's relationship with sister societies, particularly in the realms of the performing arts and related regional studies.

Roland S. Moore, Ph.D., is Center Director and Senior Research Scientist at the Prevention Research Center of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Berkeley, CA [ https://prev.org/person/roland-s-moore-phd/ ]. His doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley’s Anthropology Department focused upon the cultural repercussions of economic change including tourism work and rural-urban migration in Central Greece. In 1988, Dr. Moore was named honorary citizen of Arachova in Boeotia. His present research interests concern the prevention or reduction of problems connected with the use of alcohol, commercial tobacco, and other drugs in community settings (such as American Indian reservation communities) and occupational contexts (e.g., military workplaces). Accordingly, the vast majority of his publications concern public health [ https://prev.org/research2/publications/?fwp_search_publications=Moore ]. A Life Member of the MGSA, Dr. Moore continues to follow developments in MGS with great interest. He was a Lecturer at the Center for Modern Greek Studies, San Francisco State University between 1997 and 2011. He also served as Book Review Editor for the Social Sciences, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 2013-2016. Cluttering your inbox, he has served as coordinator of the MGSA-L email list for decades, which is why you might recognize his name.

Dimitri Nakassis is Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. His main research interests are the archaeology and texts of Late Bronze Age "Mycenaean" Greece and archaeological survey. He's co-director of the Pylos Tablets Digital Project, which uses computational photography and other methods to document the Linear B tablets from Pylos, and the Western Argolid Regional Project, a diachronic archaeological survey. His work intersects with modern Greek studies in two main areas. First, he's interested in the archaeology and ethnography of modern Greece, primarily as it relates to archaeological fieldwork in the Greek countryside; the Western Argolid Regional Project is informed by ethnographic work that we hope to integrate into our interpretation in meaningful ways. Second, he has a burgeoning interest in Greek intellectual history, especially 19th and early 20th century historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists; this is motivated by an interest in the way that scholars like Christos Tsountas (1857-1934) interpreted the prehistoric period as part of a continuous history of Hellenism that could be informed by contemporary Greek life.

Tom Papademetriou (incumbent) currently serves as President of the Modern Greek Studies Association having begun his term during the Covid pandemic and leading the MGSA during its successful 2022 Toronto Symposium. Papademetriou is the Constantine and Georgiean Georgiou Endowed Professor of Greek History at Stockton University. His research focuses on non-Muslims under Ottoman rule, and he teaches the history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Greece. As Director of the Dean C. and Zoë S. Pappas Interdisciplinary Center for Hellenic Studies, he leads a collaborative of six endowed Hellenic Studies professors, works with university administration, is liaison to the Greek-American community, and raises funds. He established the Constantelos Hellenic Collection and Reading Room, assisted in establishing foreign exchange agreements with universities in Athens, Thessalonike, and Nicosia, has organized international symposia in Delphi, Istanbul, and Nicosia, and a travel seminar at the Centre for Asia Minor Studies. He co-chaired the Local Arrangements Committee when Stockton University hosted the 25th Symposium of MGSA in 2017.

Fevronia K. Soumakis holds a PhD in History and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and currently teaches in the Modern Greek Program at Queens College, CUNY, where she is affiliated with the Center for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. Her research interests include the history of education, immigration and ethnicity, and religion and education. Fevronia is the co-editor with Theodore G. Zervas of Educating Greek Americans: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Pathways (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and is currently working on her next book project which examines the history of Greek American women, education, and philanthropy in the twentieth century. Her work on education and Greek Americans has appeared in The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States (Kaliambou, ed., 2023) and Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation (Anagnostou, Kalogeras, and Patrona, eds., 2021). Fevronia has served as a member of the Transnational Studies Committee of the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA). She has held leadership positions in Division F- History and Historiography of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), having served as Program Chair, Mentoring Chair, and Book Awards Committee Chair. Fevronia is the 2019 recipient of the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Studies Fellowship and is twice a recipient of the Queens College Open Educational Resources Fellowship (2019 and 2022).

Yona Stamatis is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Director of the Music Program at the University of Illinois, Springfield. She received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Michigan in 2011. Her research focus is on Greek folk and popular song with special attention to contemporary rebetiko performance in Greece. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and a Constantine Tsangadas Fellowship for Hellenic Studies Research. Yona has served on the Ethnomusicology Advisory Council for the College Music Society and chaired the Society for Ethnomusicology Anatolian Ecumene Special Interest Group. She is chair of the 2023 New Directions in Greek Popular Music Research Conference committee. Yona is the founding music editor of Ergon: Greek/American & Diaspora Arts and Letters. She is also an active musician, performing rebetiko bouzouki and violin.

Will Stroebel is an Assistant Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. His work focuses on modern Greek and Turkish literatures, border studies, migration, book history and material culture. His first monograph, Literature’s Refuge at the East-West Borderscape, is currently under review. In all these capacities, he aims to expand the audience and interlocutors of Modern Greek Studies, which he believes has much to offer the larger intellectual ecosystem of the humanities and social sciences. To this end, he feels humbled to serve the MGSA, which has always been like an extended family. As a relatively recent PhD student, he could potentially serve the graduate studies committee, or, given work in the field of book history, he could also stand as liaison to the library committee. Will considers it an honor to offer service and give back to the MGSA community.