Faculty

Stathis Kalyvas, Co-Director
Stathis N. Kalyvas, Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1993, is Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence. He is the author of The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2006) which received the Woodrow Wilson prize for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs published in 2006, and of The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Cornell University Press, 1996) which received the J. David Greenstone Award for the best book in the field of politics and history. He has received the Gregory Luebbert Award for the best article in comparative politics, a Jean Monnet Fellowship, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Peace Institute, and the Folke Bernadotte Academy. He is currently researching the microdynamics of civil war, with a focus on warfare, recruitment, and violence, using disaggregated data from Colombia and Vietnam, among others. http://research.yale.edu/stathis

John Geanakoplos, Co-Director
John Geanakoplos (b. 1955) received his B.A. in Mathematics from Yale University in 1975 (summa cum laude), his M.A. in Mathematics and his Ph.D. in Economics under Kenneth Arrow from Harvard University in 1980. He started as an Assistant Professor in Economics at Yale University in 1980, becoming an Associate Professor in 1983, Professor in 1986, and the James Tobin Professor of Economics in 1994. He was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1990 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. He was awarded the Samuelson Prize in 1999 (for work on lifetime financial security), and was awarded the first Bodossaki Prize in economics in 1994. In 1990-1991 and again in 1999-2000 he directed the economics program at the Santa Fe Institute, where he remains an external professor. He spent terms as visiting professor at MSRI in the University of California, Berkeley, at Churchill College, Cambridge, at the University of Pennsylvania, and at MIT. From 1990-1995 he was a Managing Director and Head of Fixed Income Research at Kidder, Peabody & Co., Inc, and now he is a partner at Ellington Capital Management. In 1970 he won the United States Junior Open Chess Championship.

George Syrimis, Associate Chair and Lecturer in Comparative Literature
George Syrimis grew up on the island of Cyprus. After completing his military service, he received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Cornell University where he completed his B.Sc. in Education in 1990. He subsequently pursued graduate work at Harvard University where he studied Modern Greek, Classical Greek and Modern Spanish literature. His dissertation on the poetics of C.P. Cavafy’s love poems was entitled “”Try to Guard Them, Poet”: Homoeroticism and the Poetics of Opacity in C. P. Cavafy.” In 2001, he joined the newly established Program in Hellenic Studies at Yale University as the language lector and in 2004 was promoted to associate Program Chair of the same program. He has published articles on the oral tradition, Georgios Vizyenos, Cavafy, Mikis Theodorakis, and Nikos Kazantzakis. In addition to his academic work, he has also developed two electronic projects (Lexis and Ikones) for the instructions of Modern Greek. His research interests include music and national identity, religion and literature, cultural studies, reception studies, and gender and sexuality. His current research focuses on the literature on Julian the Apostate from the Enlightenment to the present.

Maria Kaliambou, Lector in Hellenic Studies
Maria Kaliambou received her first degree in History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1997), and her Ph.D. in Folklore Studies/European Ethnology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (2005). She was a post-doctoral researcher at the University Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3 (2006) and post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University (2006-2007). She is currently a Lector in modern Greek at the Hellenic Studies Program at Yale and teaching courses in folklore and modern Greek language. In 2006, she received the "Lutz Röhrich prize" in Germany for her book Heimat – Glaube – Familie. Wertevermittlung in griechischen Popularmärchen (1870-1970) [Home – Faith – Family: Transmission of Values in Greek Popular Booklets of Tales (1870-1970)]. Her research interests range from folk narrative (with a specialization in folktales), popular literature, history of books, history and theory of folklore studies, Southeast European cultural studies, and European philhellenism. She has worked on academic and cultural projects in Greece and Germany and has previously taught at the department of Folklore Studies/European Ethnology, University of Munich.

Giorgos Antoniou, Post-Doctoral fellow and Lecturer in History
Georgios Antoniou received his Ph.D. in History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (2007). His dissertation title was “The Memory and Historiography of the Greek Civil War, 1943-1949.” He is currently is a postdoctoral associate and Lecturer of Hellenic Studies at the Macmillan Center teaching course in modern Greek history and the memory of conflicts. He was previously a fellow of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah in Paris (2005-2007). He has edited volumes in Greek and Italian and his work has appeared, among others, in the Journal of Peace Research and History and Theory Journals. His main research interests are: Historiography, Commemoration of Conflicts; Civil Wars; Cultural History; Collective and Individual Memory.

Konstantina Maragkou is a historian. She received her PhD and an MPhil in Historical Studies from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Modern History, Economic History and Politics from the University of London. Her doctoral thesis, which was completed with the support of a number of funding awards, is titled The Wilson Government and the Greek Colonels, 1967-1970. She is currently a postdoctoral associate and Lecturer of Hellenic Studies at the Macmillan Center teaching courses in modern Greek and European history. She was previously the A.G. Leventis Post-Doctoral Research  Fellow at the Hellenic Observatory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She had also held visiting fellowships at the European Institute of the LSE, the Remarque Institute of New York University and the Hellenic Foundation for Foreign and European Policy (ELIAMEP). Her research interests include Twentieth Century World History and Modern Greek History with special emphasis on Greece's foreign relations in the post-WWII era. Her current project involves the revision, expansion and publication of her doctoral dissertation on Britain and the Greek Colonels, 1967-1974. On various aspects of this era, she has given a number of presentations at conferences and published articles at peer-reviewed historical journals.

Affiliate Faculty (all Yale)

Robert Nelson
Robert Nelson studies and teaches medieval art, mainly in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the history and methods of art history. He was the co-curator of Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2006-2007. His most recent book, Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950, 2004, asks how the cathedral of Constantinople, once ignored or despised, came to be regarded as one of the great monuments of world architecture. It works with varieties of evidence pertaining to the history of Istanbul, medieval revival architecture, and the communities that supported and benefited from the study of Byzantium. Articles in press investigate Byzantine and Italian interrelations in the later Middle Ages and art, ritual, and public spaces in Constantinople.

Youval Rotman
Youval Rotman, who received his Ph.D. from Paris X-Nanterre and Tel Aviv Universities in 2002, is a historian of Byzantium. His main field of interest is social history of the Eastern Mediterranean World from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages. He has written his dissertation on slavery in the Byzantine World and is currently working on Arab-Byzantine relationships and on Byzantine hagiography. His book Les esclaves et l'esclavage. De la Méditerranée antique à la Méditerranée médiévale, VIe - XIe siècles was published by Les Belles Lettres (Paris, 2004).

Dimitri Gutas
Dimitri Gutas, Professor of Arabic and Graeco-Arabic (Ph.D. Yale 1974) did his undergraduate and graduate work at Yale in classics, history of religions, and Arabic and Islamic studies. He studies and teaches medieval Arabic and the medieval intellectual tradition in Islamic civilization from different aspects. At the center of his concerns lies the study and understanding of classical Arabic in its many forms as a prerequisite for the proper appreciation of the written sources which inform us about the history and culture of Islamic societies. He also has an abiding interest in the transmission of Greek scientific and philosophical works into the Islamic world through the momentous Graeco-Arabic translation movement in Baghdad during the 8th-10th centuries AD (2nd-4th Hijri). Out of these two interests grew the longstanding project to compile, in collaboration with Professor Gerhard Endress of Bochum University, Germany, A Greek and Arabic Lexicon, which provides “materials for a dictionary of the medieval translations from Greek into Arabic” (Leiden 1992 and ff.). The Lexicon is compiled in fascicles that appear in regular intervals, and interested graduate students in the Department have the opportunity to participate in the continuing project and sharpen their linguistic skills in both classical Arabic and classical Greek.

Stephen Davis
Stephen Davis is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, specializing in the history of Christianity in late antiquity. He offers courses on the social and theological history of ancient Christianity from its beginnings to the seventh century, with a special focus on the latter half of this period. His areas of teaching and research include the study of women and gender, pilgrimage and the cult of the saints, the history of biblical interpretation and canon formation, Egyptian Christianity, the Arabic Christian theological tradition, early Christian art and material culture, and the application of anthropological, sociological, and literary methods in the study of historical texts. He is author of The Cult of St. Thecla: A Tradition of Women's Piety in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2001), and co-author of Be Thou There: The Holy Family's Journey in Egypt (American University in Cairo Press, 2001). His most recent book, The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and Its Leadership in Late Antiquity (American University in Cairo Press, 2004), represents the first volume in a three-volume series he is co-editing on The Popes of Egypt: A History of the Coptic Church and Its Patriarchs from Saint Mark to Pope Shenouda III.

Nicholas Sambanis
Nicholas Sambanis is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in June 1999. His publications have appeared in several journals, including the American Political Science Review, World Politics, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Perspectives on Politics, and The Journal of African Economies. He is the co-author of Making War and Building Peace, a book about United Nations peace-building published by Princeton University Press in 2006. He is co-editor of Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis, two volumes of case studies on civil war, published by the World Bank in 2005. He is currently working on a book on the causes of self-determination movements and secessionist civil war. Professor Sambanis is researching questions on violent civil conflict; the interaction of economic development, political institutions, and civil war; and the uses of international organizations to prevent or resolve large-scale political violence.

Christopher Beeley
Christopher Beeley is the Walter H. Gray Assistant Professor of Anglican Studies and Patristics. Professor Beeley’s research interests include early Christian theology, biblical interpretation, spirituality, and classical Anglicanism. He is the author of Gregory of Nazianus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God (Oxford University Press, 2007), and he is currently working on a larger reassessment of Nicene orthodoxy and a study of classical models of Christian leadership. He is on the editorial board of the Anglican Theological Review and a member of the board of directors of the North American Patristic Society and the Society of Biblical Literature. At Yale he teaches early Christian theology and Anglican theology, and he is involved in Berkeley Divinity School’s Anglican formation program. An Episcopal priest, he has served parishes in Texas, Indiana, Virginia, and the New Haven area, and he is active on the diocesan and national levels.