Harris Mylonas announced as the Edward and Emily McWhinney Memorial Lecturer for 2020

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies, in collaboration with the Edward McWhinney Professor in International Relations, Dr. James Horncastle, is pleased to announce the Fourth Annual Edward and Emily McWhinney Lecturer for 2020: Dr. Harris Mylonas. Dr. Mylonas is an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs, where he has made significant contributions to our understanding of states’ management of diversity, originating, perhaps, from national minorities, immigrants, diasporas, or refugees.

Dr. Mylonas will be presenting the 2020 Edward and Emily McWhinney Lecture on the evening of Thursday, March 19, 2020 at the Segal Building in downtown Vancouver. Registration for this free event will begin in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. In the meantime, please save the date.

Speaker bio

Harris Mylonas is associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He is the editor-in-chief of Nationalities Papers published by Cambridge University Press for the Association for the Study of Nationalities. After completing his PhD in political science at Yale University in 2008, Mylonas was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University (2008-09 & 2011-12). He recently served as associate dean for research at the Elliott School of International Affairs (2017-18). He is the chair of the Council for European Studies’ Historical Study of States and Regimes Research Network since 2019.

Mylonas’ work contributes to our understanding of states’ management of diversity that may originate from national minorities, immigrants, diasporas, or refugees. He is particularly interested in the role of decision makers’ perceptions about foreign involvement in their domestic affairs and the impact these perceptions have on the planning and implementation of state policies. He is the author of The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities (Cambridge University Press, 2013), for which he won the 2014 European Studies Book Award by the Council for European Studies, as well as The Peter Katzenstein Book Prize  in 2013. Mylonas’ work has also been published in Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Security Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Nations and Nationalism, Social Science Quarterly, Nationalities Papers, Ethnopolitics, and various edited volumes. He is currently working on his next book tentatively titled Diaspora Management Logics where he analyzes various governmental decisions vis-à-vis different diaspora segments.  

The recent political and financial crisis in Europe, with Greece at its epicenter, occupied much of his attention in the past ten years. He published a series of op-eds in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy.com, CNN.com, the Guardian, Newsweek Japan, among others as well as more analytical pieces, academic articles, and chapters in edited volumes. Since 2010, he writes the annual report on developments in Greece for the European Journal of Political Research; since 2018, he contributes to the Freedom House reports on Greece and Cyprus. His documentary film Searching for Andreas: Political Leadership in Times of Crisis, which also deals with the deep causes of the recent financial and political crisis in Greece, premiered at the 2018 Thessaloniki Documentary Festival and won two awards at the 2019 International Documentary Festival of Ierapetra.