Nick Alexiou (Queens College, City University, New York)
Nicholas Alexiou was born in Volos, Greece, where he studied economics. He has taught in the Department of Sociology at Queens College, CUNY, since 1990, and he has received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. His fields of interest are social and political sociology, and ethnic studies. He has established the first Community & Oral History Archive – Library & Museum, for the Greeks of New York, and he is the Director of Research of the Hellenic American Project (HAP), at Queens College (www.hapsoc.org). Also, a contemporary poet, he is the author of six books of poetry, and many of his poems have been published in Greek and American journals and anthologies. His most recent bilingual book of poetry, “The Silver Sphynx” was published by Melani Press, Athens, 2019. He is a member of the Greek Authors Association, Greece, and the Greek American Writers Guild Association, NY.
Yiorgos Anagnostou (Ohio State University)
Yiorgos Anagnostou is the Miltiadis Marinakis Professor of Modern Greek language and culture at The Ohio State University. His research interests include diaspora and American ethnic studies, with a focus on Greek America. His published research covers a broad range of subjects, including film, documentary, ethnography, folklore, literature, history, sociology, and public humanities. His work has appeared in Melus, Diaspora, Ethnicities, Italian American Review, Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Journal of Modern Hellenism, Modern Greek Studies (Australia & New Zealand), Journal of Greek Media and Culture, The Classical Bulletin, and in several edited volumes. He is the author of Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America (Ohio University Press, 2009; Greek translation from Nisos, 2021). Also, two poetry collections. He is a co-editor of the volume Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation (forthcoming from Fordham University Press, Spring 2022). Since 2017 he is the editor of the online journal Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters, which features Greek American scholarship, poetry, and essays (http://ergon.scienzine.com/). He writes regularly for the Greek and Greek American media.
Athanasios Gekas (York University, Toronto, Canada)
Athanasios (Sakis) Gekas is Associate Professor and Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair in Modern Greek History at York University. His recent book projects include Xenocracy: State, Class, and Colonialism in the Ionian Islands, 1815-1864 (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017), which was translated in Greek Ξενοκρατία. Οικονομία, Κοινωνία και Κράτος στα Επτάνησα 1815-1864 (Athens: Hellenic Open University Press, 2021). His forthcoming book is Απόμαχοι. Οι αγωνιστές του 1821 στο Οθωνικό κράτος (Athens: National Research Foundation, 2021). Sakis also works on the history of Greeks in Canada. He has contributed to the Immigrec project, a virtual museum of Greek migration to Canada (https://immigrec.com/), and to the creation of the Hellenic Heritage Foundation Greek Canadian Archives at York University.
Dan Georgakas (Queens College, City University, New York)
Dan Georgakas is Director of the Greek American Studies Project at the Center for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Queens College, City University of New York. He is editor of the American Journal of Contemporary Hellenic Issues, executive editor of the Journal of Modern Hellenism, and a biweekly columnist for the National Herald. He has spoken about Greek America on Voice of America, Greek National Television (ERT), National Public Radio, and other mass media. His works on Greece include My Detroit: Growing Up Greek and American in Motor City; Greek America at Work; and Greek American Radicals:The Twentieth Century. Previously he was editor of the now defunct Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora. His poems with Greek subject matter have appeared in numerous anthologies.
Maria Kaliambou (Yale University)
Maria Kaliambou is Senior Lector at the Hellenic Studies Program and teaches folklore and Modern Greek language. She earned my B.A. in History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and her Ph.D. in Folklore Studies/European Ethnology at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Germany. She held post-doctoral positions at the University Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3 and in Princeton University. In 2006, her dissertation received the “Lutz Röhrich prize” in Germany as the best dissertation in oral literature, and in 2011 the European Commission elected her as “Erasmus Student Ambassador of Greece”. In 2006 she published her first book Home – Faith – Family: Transmission of Values in Greek Popular Booklets of Tales (1870-1970) (in German), and in 2015 The Routledge Modern Greek Reader. Greek Folktales for Learning Modern Greek, Routledge. She is currently working on her third book with the tentative title The Book Culture of Greek Americans. Her research situates folklore in a broader interdisciplinary net, combining literature, book history, and diaspora studies. Also, she is interested in foreign language pedagogy, especially teaching Modern Greek.
April Kalogeropoulos Householder (Honors College, University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
Dr. April Kalogeropoulos Householder is the Director of Undergraduate Research and Prestigious Scholarships and teaches in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is a former faculty member in the Gender and Women’s Studies program at UMBC, and she taught courses at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Comparative Literature Program, where she completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Film Studies (2006). Her dissertation included the production of a documentary film about Laskarina Bouboulina, Greece’s first female navy admiral, who made major contributions to the Greek Revolution. She continues to write and publish about Greece and comparative media and identity politics. In 2016, Dr. Householder 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, including essays on gendered representations of the Greek economic crisis in the media, Baltimore’s radical feminists, and fourth wave feminism and the HBO show, Girls. She is currently editing a collection of essays on Bouboulina, due out in 2022.
Alexander Kitroeff (Haverford College)
Alexander Kitroeff is a Professor of History at Haverford College, where he has been teaching since 1996. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Politics from Warwick University, his Master’s Degree from Keele University, and a doctorate in modern history from the University of Oxford. In 1986, he began teaching at the Byzantine & Modern Greek Center at Queens College at the City University in New York. In 1990 he moved across town to the Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies at New York University. His next position was at the History Department at Haverford College on Philadelphia’s “Main Line.”
Kitroeff’s research focuses on ethnicity in modern Greece and the diaspora from politics to sports. He has published six books: The Greeks in Egypt, 1919-1937: Ethnicity & Class, London, 1989; Griegos en América, Madrid, 1992; Wrestling with the Ancients: Modern Greek Identity and the Olympics, New York, 2004; Ελλάς, Ευρώπη Παναθηναϊκός! 100 Χρόνια Ελληνική Ιστορία, New York, 2010; The Greeks and the Making of Modern Egypt, 2019; Greek Orthodoxy in America: A Modern History, New York, 2020. He is continuing his collaboration with film director Maria Iliou as a historical consultant for five documentaries, the most recent being “Athens from East to West 1821-1896,” which premiered at the Benaki Museum in Athens in early 2020. It is the first of a five-part series on the history of Modern Athens. Kitroeff’s current projects include a book commemorating the 100-year history of AHEPA from 1922 to 2022, and a book on Greek-owned diners in America.
Kostis Kourelis (Franklin & Marshall College)
Kostis Kourelis is an architectural historian who specializes in the archaeology of the Mediterranean and how it shapes modern notions of identity, space, and aesthetics. His recent fieldwork focuses on the archaeology of labor, housing, and modern immigration. He directs archaeological surveys of deserted villages and refugee camps in Greece, as well as ethnic slums, temporary housing, and internment camps in the U.S. He is Associate Professor of Art History at Franklin & Marshall College and director of The Center for the Sustained Engagement with Lancaster. Recent work on Greek American archaeology includes, “Drones and Stones: Mapping Deserted Villages in Lidoriki Greece,” “Three Elenis: Archaeologies of the Greek American Village,” and “Style and Real Estate: Architecture of Faith among the Greek and Italian Immigrants, 1870-1925.”
Fevronia Soumakis (Queens College, City University, New York)
Fevronia K. Soumakis holds a PhD in History and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She currently teaches in the Modern Greek Program at Queens College, The City University of New York. Her research interests include the history of education, immigration and ethnicity, and religion and education. She is co-editor with Theodore G. Zervas of Educating Greek Americans: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Pathways (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Fevronia was the 2021 Program Chair for Division F- History and Historiography of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and is serving as a member of the Transnational Studies Committee of the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA). She is excited to work on her next book project which examines the history of Greek American women, education, and philanthropy in the twentieth century.