Dr Paris Chronakis - Lecturer in Modern Greek History

I am a social and cultural historian of Modern Greece, Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean working on Christian, Jewish and Muslim relations. I teach BA and MA modules on the imperial and post-imperial Mediterranean, global refugees and minorities in Eastern Europe.

My work explores questions of transition from empire to nation-state bringing together the interrelated histories of Jewish, Muslim and Christian urban middle classes from the late Ottoman Empire to the Holocaust. I have researched and published on post-imperial urban identities, Balkan War refugees, Zionism and anti-Zionism in interwar Europe, the Holocaust of Sephardi Jewry and digital Holocaust Studies.

At Royal Holloway, I teach undergraduate modules on the making of the global refugee and on empires, minorities and democracy in Eastern- and Southeastern Europe. My MA module explores the connected histories of diasporas, refugees and minorities in twentieth-century Europe and the Mediterranean. I aim to equip students with thinking and writing skills fit for the digital age as well as cultivate their social skills and emotional intelligence by developing their empathy.

I am most attached to a digital project I co-led, the Database of Greek-Jewish Holocaust Survivors’ Testimonies. The database collects for the first time data from over 1,000 audio-visual testimonies of Greek Jewish Holocaust survivors and is as much an online memorial as it is a virtual archive offered to the academic community and every interested citizen.

I am currently completing The business of Transition, a monograph detailing the passage of multi-ethnic business elites from the Ottoman Empire to the successor nation-states by weaving together the cross-cutting trajectories of Sephardic Jewish, Greek Orthodox and Muslim entrepreneurs.

I have also been working on a second book-length project, The World War before the First World War. This project recasts the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 as a pivotal moment in the histories of forced migration, transnational civil society and global humanitarianism. Rather than a foretaste of World War One, the project argues, the Balkan Wars constituted a watershed in pan-European civil engagement and the emergence of a global civil society.

Finally, together with Professor Sarah Abrevaya Stein (UCLA), I have just started research on Jewish cemeteries and their post-war fate tracing the ‘recycling’ of removed Jewish tombstones all over the Greek city of Thessaloniki during and after the Holocaust.

More information about my research is available via PURE

Email - paris.chronakis@rhul.ac.uk