Participants

Sadia Abbas is associate professor of postcolonial studies at Rutgers-Newark.  She received her Ph.D. from Brown University and BA from Wellesley College. She specializes in postcolonial literature and theory, the culture and politics of Islam in modernity, early modern English literature, especially the literature of religious strife, and the history of twentieth-century criticism.

Her interests range from film, European perceptions of Europe’s own history and identity, Greek modernism, networks of cultural circulation in the Mediterranean, religion, theology and theory, the history of European Christianity, religious fundamentalisms, neoliberalism, the rise of the global right, contemporary British fiction, gender and religion to early Netherlandish and Renaissance painting and contemporary Pakistani art.

In addition to At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament (co-winner of the MLA first book prize) and The Empty Room (a novel), she has authored numerous essays on subjects ranging from Jesuit poetics and Catholic martyrdom in Early Modern English poetry, neoliberalism and the Greek crisis, Pakistani art, the uses of Reformation in contemporary Muslim thought, to Jewish converts to Islam and treatments of subjectivity in contemporary theorizations of Muslim female agency. She has also written essay and opinion pieces for Dawn (the Pakistani Newspaper), Naya Daur, OpenDemocracy and TANK magazine, among others.  At Rutgers she directs the multi-media and multi-disciplinary speaker series, Postcolonial Questions and Performances.

Maria Boletsi is Endowed Professor (bijzonder hoogleraar) at the University of Amsterdam, where she holds the Marilena Laskaridis Chair of Modern Greek Studies. She also works as assistant professor at the Film and Literary Studies department of Leiden University.

Her work is situated in the fields of comparative literature, literary and cultural theory, conceptual history, Modern Greek literature and culture, English, Dutch, and postcolonial literature. She has published on various topics, including the conceptual history of barbarism, post-9/11 literature and political rhetoric, Modern Greek, Anglo-American and Dutch literature, and alternative narratives and subjectivities in the context of the Greek debt crisis. Much of her work is concerned with the intersection of literature, art, and politics.

She has been a Stanley Seeger Research Fellow at Princeton University (2016), a visiting scholar at Columbia University (2008-09) and the University of Geneva (2016) and a participant in the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory (2006). She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies and in the editorial team of the Brill book series Thamyris/Intersecting.

Maria has cum laude degrees in Classics and Modern Greek Literature (BA, Aristoteles University of Thessaloniki), Comparative Literature (BA, University of Amsterdam) and Cultural Analysis (research MA, University of Amsterdam).  In 2010 she received her Ph.D. with honors from Leiden University (Barbarism Otherwise: Studies in Literature, Art, and Theory).

Vangelis Calotychos was raised in London, United Kingdom, and came to the United States for graduate study in 1985. He received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. He has held full-time faculty appointments in modern Greek literature and culture and comparative literature at Harvard, NYU, Columbia and, since 2014, he is Visiting Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He is founder of the ‘Modern Greek Seminar’ at Columbia’s University Seminars’ Program, which he directed from 2005-2014. As of 2019, he will be the Executive Director of the Modern Greek Studies Association of the United States & Canada.

Calotychos has published and reviewed widely on Greek culture; critical theory, cultural studies, and politics; questions of identity and representation in southeastern Europe and Cyprus. In the 1990s, his edited volume, Cyprus and Its People: Nation, Identity and Experience in an Unimaginable Community, 1955-1997 (Westview, 1998) promoted interdisciplinary, intercommunal research on Cyprus. His first monograph, Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics (Berg, 2004), discusses the nature of modernity in Greece from just before the founding of the nation state down to the present. A collaborative translation with Patricia Felisa Barbeito of Menis Koumandareas’s short stories, Their Smell Makes Me Want To Cry, was published in the University of Birmingham Modern Greek Translations series in the same year. A volume of essays drawn from a conference Calotychos organized at Columbia in 2006 in memory of the poet Manolis Anagnostakis appeared under his editorship with the title, Manolis Anagnostakis: Poetry & Politics, Silence & Agency in Post-War Greece (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012). In 2013, The Balkan Prospect: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece After 1989 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), an interdisciplinary analysis of Greece's position within and without the Balkans and Europe after the Cold War, was awarded the Edmund Keeley Book Prize. Currently his research focuses on Greek film: he co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Greek Media and Culture (2:2, 2016) on the Greek Weird Wave & Beyond and is now working on a book about spectacular performances of resistance in Greek film.

Faisal Devji is Professor of Indian History and Fellow of St. Antony's College in the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Institute of Public Knowledge Fellow at New York University. Devji is the author of four books, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (2005), The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (2009), The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (2012) and Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (2013).

R. A. Judy is Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches course in world literature, critical and literary theory, and literary criticism. He is a member of the Editorial Collective of boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture, published by Duke University Press. Having done undergraduate studies in Islamic studies and Arabic literature at al-Azhar University, Cairo Egypt, Professor Judy received his BA in Islamic philosophy and culture from the University of Minnesota in 1982, and his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota in 1990. A Recipient of prestigious honors from the Ford and Mellon Foundations, he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes, Université de Tunis I, in Tunis, Tunisia, and has traveled extensively in the Middle East and North Africa. Professor Judy is the author of (Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative (1992), and has edited numerous special issues and dossiers for boundary 2, among which are: Tunisia Dossier (2012), Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years (2003); Sociology Hesitant: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dynamic Thinking(2001), Reasoning and the Logic of Things Global, (1999), and Scattered Speculations on Value: Exchange Between Etienne Balibar, Antonio Negri, and Gayatri Spivak  (1999). Each of these issues have elaborated the work of critical theory and literary criticism across fields as diverse as Black studies, global English studies, modern Arabic literary studies, and comparative literature. Professor Judy has also published numerous essays in the areas of philosophy, contemporary Islamic philosophy, literary/cultural theory, music, and Arabic and American literatures. Among these are: “Restless Tunisians” in La Tunisie du XXIe siècle: Quels pouvoirs pour quels modèles de société? (EuroOrient, 2012), “Dreaming About the Singularity of the New Middle Ages: Three Provisional Notes on the Question of Imagination” (Critical Zone 3, 2009); “Some Thoughts on Naguib Mahfouz in the Spirit of Secular Criticism” (boundary 2, 2007), “Sayyid Qutb’s fiqh al- waqi‘i, or New Realist Science” (boundary 2, 2004), “The Threat to Islamic Humanity After 11 September 2001” (Critical Quarterly, 2003), “September 11 Uttorkal O Bipponno Islami Manobota” (Abobhash 3, 2003), “Islamiyya and the Construction of Human Being” in Trends in Islamic Thought (1998), “The New Black Aesthetic and W.E.B. Du Bois, or Hephaestus, Limping” (The Massachusetts Review, 1994), “The Question of Nigga Authenticity” (boundary 2, 1994), and “Kant and the Negro,” (Surfaces, 1991). He is currently finishing up the manuscript for a book project under contract with Fordham University Press, entitled “Thinking in Disorder: Essays of Poetic Socialities in Radical Humanism,” as well as working on a subsequent book project tentatively called “Fanon, the Last Negro and the Revolutionary Poetics of Sociality.”

Phevos Kororos-Simeonidis is a grad student in the Forensic architecture program at Goldsmiths, run by Eyal Weizmann, an outstanding young activist who has worked with refugee communities and anti-racist, no borders projects in Greece.

Eirini Kotsovili studied History and Hispanic studies at McGill University and Literature at University of Oxford (while at St. Cross College and Somerville College, where she also served as a Junior Dean). Currently, she is a Lecturer and member of SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies at SFU. Her research and teaching interests revolve around the use of the auto/biographical element and fall under the thematic spheres of identity, politics, gender, memory and the writers' reflections on cultural, socio-political, historical contexts while drawing material from lived experiences. Her publications include “The Dark Side of the Sun: Aegean Islands as Places of Exile, Desolation and Death in the post-World War II Politically Turbulent Greece” and co-editing the volume “Consumption and Gender in Southern Europe since the Long 1960s”.

Nikos Papadogiannis’ research focuses on Europe in the 1960s and 1970s from a transnational perspective. His research interests include protest cultures, travel, youth lifestyles, gender, sexuality, migration, emotions and European identities. His doctoral thesis offered a cultural history of politics, examining left-wing youth politics in relation to leisure and sexuality in post-authoritarian Greece in the 1970s. For further details, see his profile on academia.edu.

Current Projects

• Transnational Youth Exchange Programmes and West German Youth Lifestyles, 1950s-1980s

The West German state placed emphasis on transnational youth exchange programmes from its establishment as a means of establishing close ties with other “Western” nations. My project examines the aims and impact of these exchange programmes, analyzing the extent to which they influenced youth lifestyles and informal cross-border tourism. The latter became increasingly popular among young people in West Germany from the 1960s on, but has largely been neglected in historical research. The project is simultaneously a history from above and from below: it helps illuminate the shaping of West German cultural diplomacy and of youth cultures in the context of the Cold War. The first stage of this project was funded by an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. A relevant article has been recently published in the Journal of Contemporary History.

• The radicalisation of Greek migrants in West Germany, 1960s-1970s

This project analyses the impact of left-wing ideas and cultures on migrants of Greek origin residing in West Germany. It considers the impact of diverse conditions, especially of the protests around 1968 as well as of the establishment and the collapse of the Greek dictatorial regime. Part of this research has been published as an article in Contemporary European History. Expanding on a body of literature that explores the transnational dimensions of protest movements in the 1960s and the 1970s, this article addresses left-wing migrants of Greek origin living in West Germany. It demonstrates that these transnational dimensions were not mutually exclusive with the fact that at least some of those protestors felt that they belonged to a particular nation.

Eleni Takou is Deputy Director and Head of Advocacy of the HumanRights360. She has studied communication, political science and political philosophy in Athens and Paris. She has worked in Advocacy and Programs sector of several NGOs, including the Hellenic League for Human Rights and SolidarityNow. During 2015, she has served as Chief of Staff of the Minister for Migration Policy. Prior to this, she has been coordinating the Racist Violence Recording Network, a coalition of CSOs under the auspices of UNHCR Office in Greece and the Greek National Commission for Human Rights. She has also been a consultant on issues of statelessness for UNHCR Greece.

Her work is focused on refugee protection, migration, citizenship and anti-racism advocacy. She has been a member of the writing team of the Annual Yearbooks of Legislation and Jurisprudence on Migrants and Refugees (ed. Savvalas), until 2015. She is co-writer of the book Immigration in Greece. Eleven myths and more facts, published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (http://rosalux.gr/publication/i-metanasteysi-stin-ellada).

Jini Kim Watson received two undergraduate degrees, in architecture and literature, in Australia, before doing her doctoral study at Duke’s Literature Program. Her teaching and research investigate the ways that postcolonial cultural production—literature, film, theoretical writings—have reckoned with ongoing questions of decolonization, national and global imaginaries, uneven development and political modernity. Her book The New Asian City (Minnesota UP, 2011) examined the rise of so-called “Asian Tiger” economies and metropolises through a lens attentive to colonial histories, national imaginaries and Cold War hegemonies. She has also co-edited a collected volume of essays with Gary Wilder on The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham UP, 2018).

More recently, Jini has written on the films of Tan Pin Pin and Singapore as model city for the global south; on Ninotchka Rosca and anti-dictatorship literature; on Hwang Sôk-yông and the legacy of the divided Korean peninsula; and on Oceanic literature and sovereignty with regard to Australia’s offshore refugee detention centers. Her current book project, Ruling Like a Foreigner, asks what literary representations of Cold War authoritarian regimes in Asia can tell us about the autocratic turn in the postcolonial world, as well as our current moment.

Jini regularly teaches undergraduate classes on postcolonial literature and theory, globalization, theories and practices of liberation, and Asia/Pacific literature and film. Her recent graduate seminars have included “Cold War/Postcolonial”; “The Postcolonial Contemporary”; “Place, Space and the Postcolonial” and “Literary Dictatorships”. Since arriving at NYU she has been co-convener of the Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Studies Colloquium, which regularly gathers noted and emerging scholars in the field for discussion and conviviality.

Gary Wilder is a Professor in the Ph.D. Programs of Anthropology, History, and French and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005).  In Spring 2018 he co-authored Theses on Theory and History, an open source digital publication, with Ethan Kleinberg and Joan Wallach Scott. He is co-editor of two books: The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (with Jini Kim Watson) (Fordham University Press, 2018) and The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for the Life is the Matter (forthcoming Spring 2019, Duke University Press) (with Mariana Coronil, Laurent Dubois Paul Eiss, Edward Murphy, David Pedersen, and Julie Skurski). He is currently completing a book of essays on temporality and solidarity entitled “Untimely History, Unhomely Times” and working on a book about black radical humanism in the Atlantic world.

Wilder’s research on the French empire, Francophone West Africa and the Caribbean, and Black Atlantic social thought is located at the intersection of historical anthropology, intellectual history, and critical theory. He has published articles in the American Historical Review, Radical History Review, Public Culture, History of the Present, South Atlantic Quarterly, Political Concepts, Journal of Historical Anthropology, Anthropology and History, French Historical Studies Salon, Small Axe Salon, and African and Black Diaspora. He has published public essays in Open Democracy, Aeon Magazine, the Village Voice Literary Supplement and the Columbia literary review.

He has received research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies (2002) and the Mellon Foundation (2006). The latter’s New Directions Fellowship allowed him to spend 2007-2008 studying international law as a Visiting Fellow at the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School.