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, Lecturer and Program Coordinator
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, Senior Lector in Modern Greek
Maria Kaliambou earned her first degree in History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece in 1997, and her Ph.D. in Folklore Studies/European Ethnology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich in 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). Since 2007 she has been teaching courses in folklore and Modern Greek language at the Hellenic Studies Program at Yale. She was also visiting lecturer at the department of Folklore Studies/European Ethnology and Modern Greek Studies, University of Munich (summers 2009, 2010). 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)]. In 2011 was elected by the European Commission as Erasmus Student Ambassador of Greece. 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 is currently working on her new book “The Book Culture of Greek-Americans” and on an edition of Greek folktales.

Affiliate Faculty (all Yale)

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.

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.

Emily Greenwood
Emily Greenwood studied Classics at Cambridge University, where she gained her BA, MPhil, and PhD degrees. After finishing her PhD she was a research fellow at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge (2000–2002), before joining the department of Classics at the University of St Andrews where she was lecturer in Greek from 2002–2008.

She is currently writing a book entitled Classics: a Beginner’s Guide, for Oneworld Publications, and is editing a special issue on ‘Classics and Contemporary Fiction’ for the Classical Receptions Journal, for which she is also an Associate Editor.

Her research interests include ancient Greek historiography, Greek prose literature of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, twentieth century classical receptions (especially uses of Classics in Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and Greece), Classics and Postcolonialism, and the theory and practice of translating the ‘classics’ of Greek and Roman literature. She is more than happy to talk to students who are interested in working in any of these areas.

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.

Tassos C. Kyriakides
Tassos C. Kyriakides, Ph.D., Yale University, 1999, is a Biostatistician/Infectious Disease Epidemiologist. Born and raised in Cyprus, he received a Fulbright Scholarship and completed his B.Sc in Biochemistry at UCLA in 1993. He has worked as a biostatistician on numerous national and international medical research projects. He is a statistical consultant/analyst on numerous research protocols and has served on US and Canadian scientific evaluation committees. He is an Associate Research Scientist, Yale School of Medicine (Internal Medicine-AIDS Program) and Yale Center for Analytical Sciences (Yale School of Public Health); he is also a Biostatistician at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs Cooperative Studies Program, West Haven. His primary research focus is in the area of infectious diseases with particular emphasis on HIV/AIDS and its treatment. He also has an interest in the history of medicine, social determinants of health and the socio-cultural dimension of the benefits of Greek/Mediterranean nutrition. He is a fellow at Saybrook College.

Vasileios Marinis
Vasileios Marinis, assistant professor of Christian art and architecture. Professor Marinis’ research focuses on the art and architecture of early Christianity and the Middle Ages. He has a particular interest in the ritual, liturgical arts, representations of women and children, as well as the material culture of these periods. He has published on a variety of topics ranging from early Christian tunics decorated with New Testament scenes to medieval tombs and Byzantine transvestite nuns. He is currently preparing a monograph on the interaction of architecture and ritual in the medieval churches of Constantinople.

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.