Maria Kaliambou

Maria Kaliambou is Senior Lector II at the Hellenic Studies Program. She received her BA in History and Archaeology from Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, and her PhD in Folklore and European Ethnology from Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. She then held post-doctoral positions at the University Charles-de-Gaulle in Lille, and at Princeton University. 

Her research focuses on the dialogue between folklore and book history, particularly in the diaspora. In 2006 she published her first monograph with the title Home – Faith – Family: Transmission of Values in Greek Popular Booklets of Tales (1870-1970) (in German). In 2015 she published The Routledge Modern Greek Reader, Greek Folktales for Learning Modern Greek, Routledge, an anthology of Greek folktales for the foreign language classroom. In 2023 her edited volume The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States was published both in English (Routledge) and in Greek (Asini). She is currently working on her next monograph, tentatively titled The Book Culture of Greek Americans. 
She is also interested in foreign language pedagogy, especially the teaching of Modern Greek. She is a certified Oral Proficiency tester in Modern Greek (certified by ACTFL OPI and ILR OPI), and has also served as the Chair of the Modern Greek Special Interest Group at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. 

She has received several awards. In 2006, her dissertation received the “Lutz Röhrich prize” in Germany as the best dissertation in oral literature, and in 2011 the European Commission elected her as “Erasmus Student Ambassador of Greece”. In 2024, the Modern Greek Studies Association awarded her the Vassiliki Karagiannaki Best Edited Book Prize in Modern Greek Studies for The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States.