Participants

Jovana is a Hellenic Studies PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University, currently rounding up her 3rd year of studies. At this stage, she is moving back and forth between the educational institutions of Serbia, Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Greece, collecting instructional material such as textbooks and didactic aids, with an aim of examining methods for teaching and narrating medieval Roman past in the “orthodox” Balkan. Her research topic - Whose Byzantium? - The pathways of knowledge, memory and public history in the Balkan provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire – was inspired by the methodological approaches to texts integrated into her Byzantine studies MA thesis, along with her recent work on documentary media and contemporary reinterpretations of public memory. In the past three years, she had the opportunity to receive invaluable pedagogical experience as a TA at the SFU’s department of history, as well as in Petnica Sicence Centre, as a member of a content development and teaching team for the multidisciplinary program of Social Sciences and Humanities. Both of these treasured engagements created fertile soil in which one’s academic endeavor that encompasses historiographical scholarship, medieval sources and contemporary educational practices, has ample space for growth.

I was born in Kalamata. I graduated from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Faculty of Italian Language and Literature) and continued my postgraduate studies (Moral Philosophy) at the University of Peloponnese (Masters program organised in collaboration with the Department of Philology of the University of Peloponnese and the Department of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens). At present, I am studying for a Ph.D. at the University of Peloponnese (Moral Philosophy). I’ve worked as an Italian teacher in private schools and in various programs concerning non-formal Education and Lifelong Learning. I was a Research Fellow in the Institute “Progress in Practice” that functions under the auspices of the Hellenic Parliament. I am also a founding member of the PPE Lab at the University of Athens. My research interests revolve around Social and Political Philosophy, Ethics, and Philosophy for Children.

José Bruno Fevereiro is a PhD Candidate at The Open University, United Kingdom, and an Associate Lecturer in Economics at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He holds a MSc and BSc in Economics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). His research focuses on the history of economic thought and economic development, with particular interest on the interplay between international trade, structural change and income distribution.

Alexander Grammatikos completed his B.A. Honours at Simon Fraser University (2008); M.A. at The University of York, U.K. (2010); and Ph.D. at Carleton University (2017).

Alex's research specialties include British Romanticism and early nineteenth-century Greek culture. In his book British Romantic Literature and the Emerging Modern Greek Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Alex investigates the ways in which late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British writers constructed Modern Greece and its people, and how these literary engagements with Greece produced and complicated Britain’s relationship with the then emerging Greek nation. Alex has also published articles on women’s involvement in the early nineteenth-century literary print market and early nineteenth-century British theatre’s depictions of Greek independence.

Aleks holds a Ph.D. in History from Simon Fraser University having previously obtained MA and BA in Classics from the University of Belgrade. Aleks currently works as an instructor at both Simon Fraser University and the University of the Fraser Valley as well as a content developer for the SNF New Media Lab at SFU. His research concentrates primarily on the Later Byzantine social and cultural history with the focus on the public sphere and questions of active agency and political participation of various social groups in this pre-modern empire. He is currently working on turning his doctoral dissertation titled Michael VIII Palaiologos and the Nikaian Generation: Roman Political Culture in the Years of Exile into a book.

Fotini Kondyli is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the University of Virginia. Her research deals with the construction of Byzantine spaces, communal identity, landscape and household archaeology and the material and social lives of Byzantine non-elites. She is particularly interested in the role of ordinary people in the historical narrative and their ability to instigate long-terms changes and shape the Medieval world. Her first book examines how Late Byzantine rural communities dealt with major political and economic crises, focusing on the socioeconomic strategies they employed to build resilience.

As an active field archaeologist, Kondyli has worked in numerous archaeological sites in Greece, Albania, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Germany. She is currently involved in three archaeological projects at Athens, Thebes and northern Attica. At Athens, she is working with legacy data from the Athenian Agora Excavations to explore processes of city-making and the role of different social groups in the development of Athens in the Middle and Late Byzantine/Frankish periods. She is also the director of the Inhabiting Byzantine Athens.

Dr Paul Kosmetatos is Lecturer in International Economic History at the University of Edinburgh, having previously spent a decade trading financial derivatives in the City of London. His interests include banking history, the history of financial bubbles, crashes, and crisis containment, and the development of the Scotch Whisky industry in the late 19th Century. His monograph, The 1772-73 British Credit Crisis, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.

I was born in Athens where I lived during my childhood, teenage and college years. At the University of Athens I studied political theory and, inspired by my professors of history, decided to risk all by applying for a graduate degree in Byzantine Studies. This took me to the University of Oxford where I studied Byzantine social and political history. After an interruption of four years dedicated to military service and to teaching at the American College of Greece in Athens I moved to the US and the University of Michigan for my doctorate. Upon graduation I joined the faculty at Simon Fraser University where I work at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies.

George N. Politis is Associate Professor of Social Philosophy in the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Director of the Philosophy, Politics, Economy Research Laboratory. Over the last decade, his research has focused on the “Greek economic crisis” and its links to the consistent spread of popular irrational beliefs.

Constantinos Repapis has an M.Phil and Ph.D. from Cambridge and is the director and programme proposer of the BA and BSc in Economics in Goldsmiths. His research focuses on the history of economic thought, economic methodology, and interdisciplinary work. Inter alia he works on the concept of the ‘common reader’ in economics. He is interested on the link between economic models, government policy and public discussion. He is committed in developing a pluralist agenda in how economics is taught in higher education. He is one of the editors of Economic Thought, and his research has appeared in journals and edited volumes. 

Tiffany is currently an MA Candidate in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University, but has a B.Sc. in Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University (2019) with a concentration in Life Sciences. Additionally, she received a Certificate in Hellenic Studies (2019) through the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at SFU, which propelled an interest in Byzantium. Her research is focused specifically on De Ceremoniis or the “Book of Ceremonies,” and the different ways in which ceremonies were lived, understood, and utilized in the urban background of Constantinople.

Born in Athens, Dimitra received her bachelor’s degree in Philosophy in 2017 from the Department of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and is now enrolled in the MA program of the Department of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is a founding member of the Philosophy, Politics, Economy Research Laboratory at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and part of the editorial committee of the journal Ethics. From 2013 to 2019, she worked in local government in the Municipality of Vrilissia (suburban of Athens). From 2013 to 2017, she worked as a volunteer at the Open University of Vrilissia (Municipal Department of Education and Volunteering). She has attended and participated in several conferences and has published several articles in philosophy journals. Her research interests are rooted in Social, Political and Moral Philosophy.