The PanHellenic Welcomes New Academic Committee Members

He joined the Harvard History Department after over a decade-long career as a researcher, lecturer, and professor at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies of the University of Birmingham. His research and teaching focus on the intellectual, political, and institutional history of the Byzantine Empire. His diverse scholarly interests include empire and imperialism, the history of political thought and rhetoric, biography, geographical thought and imagination, and the impact of the Fourth Crusade on the Byzantine world. He supervises students interested in any aspect of Byzantine and medieval Balkan and eastern Mediterranean history. He is the author of Imperial Ideology and Political Thought in Byzantium, 1204-1330 (Cambridge, 2007) and The Byzantine Hellene: The Life of Emperor Theodore Laskaris and Byzantium in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 2019).

Dr. Kaliambou earned her B.A. in History and Archaeology at the University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and her Ph.D. in Folklore Studies at the University of Munich, Germany. She held post-doctoral positions at the University Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3 and in Princeton University. 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 2006 she published her first book Home – Faith – Family: Transmission of Values in Greek Popular Booklets of Tales (1870-1970) (in German), and in 2015 The Routledge Modern Greek Reader. Greek Folktales for Learning Modern Greek, Routledge. She is currently working on her third book with the tentative title “The Book Culture of Greek Americans”. Her research focuses on the dialogue between folklore and book history, particularly in the diaspora. Also, she is interested in foreign language pedagogy, especially teaching Modern Greek.

Stavroula Sofou is an associate professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering. Prof. Sofou’s research interests revolve around fundamental studies of lipid bilayers, with applications to drug delivery. She harnesses intermolecular and interfacial interactions of self-assembling materials in a biological setting, and, combining this knowledge with engineering principles, she designs successful devices to promote human health. Translational research on testing and optimization of these devices, as both diagnostics and therapeutics for medical applications, are her special interest. Stavroula Sofou received the Research Scholar Grant of the American Cancer Society as well as awards from the Coulter foundation, Susan G. Komen, and NYSTAR.