Maria Kaliambou

Maria Kaliambou is Senior Lector II and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Hellenic Studies Program at Yale University. She received her BA in History and Archaeology from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and her PhD in Folklore and European Ethnology from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the University of Lille III and Princeton University.

Her research explores the intersection of folklore and book history in Greece and the Greek diaspora. Her publications include Home, Faith, Family: The Transmission of Values in Greek Popular Folktale Booklets (1870–1970) (2006, in German), The Routledge Modern Greek Reader: Greek Folktales for Learning Modern Greek  (2015), and the edited volume The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States (2023, published in English by Routledge and in Greek by Asini). She is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled The Book Culture of Greek Americans.

Kaliambou is also active in foreign language pedagogy, particularly the teaching of Modern Greek. She is a certified Modern Greek oral proficiency tester through ACTFL and the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR), and she has served as chair of the Modern Greek Special Interest Group at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). Since 2026, she has served on the Executive Board of the Modern Greek Studies Association and has been an elected member of DELEXO (Teaching Modern Greek Abroad). She was a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow at Yale University in 2025–26.

Her honors include the Lutz Röhrich Prize from the Walter Kahn Fairy Tale Foundation for her dissertation (2006), the European Commission’s Erasmus Student Ambassador recognition for Greece (2011), and the Vassiliki Karagiannaki Best Edited Book Prize in Modern Greek Studies from the Modern Greek Studies Association (2024). In 2026, she received the Woman of Distinction Award from the Association of Greek American Professional Women (AGAPW).