Penelope Papailias
co-organizer & supervisor

Penelope Papailias (@penel_p) teaches social anthropology at the University of Thessaly and also runs the Social Anthropology Lab. She is the author of Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece (2005), an ethnography of popular historical production in contemporary Greek society. More recently, she has co-authored an online, open-access textbook, entitled Digital Ethnography (2015). She is the author of numerous articles on the cultural politics and media technologies of witnessing, focusing on topics such as affective publics, social grief, cultural memory, the database as cultural form, visuality, violence and necropolitics in the context of event virtualization, networked connectivity and database aesthetics​

Ioanna Laliotou
co-organizer & supervisor

Ioanna Laliotou is Associate Professor in Contemporary History at the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology, University of Thessaly (GR). She is author of Transatlantic Subjects. Acts of Migration and Cultures of Transnationalism between Greece and America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004) and co-editor of the collective book Women migrants between the East and the West: Gender, mobility and belonging in contemporary Europe (London: Berghan, 2007). Laliotou is also member of the editorial committee of the journal Historein. Her research interests include cultural history, subjectivity, mobility, migration and refugeeness and visions of future and utopia in contemporary society. Her forthcoming book is on The Future in History: how the twentieth century imagined a different world (Αthens: EKT, 2016).​​

Mitsos Bilalis
co-organizer & supervisor

Mitsos Bilalis is an Assistant Professor of Theory and Technology of Historical Information at the University of Thessaly, Department of History, Archaeology, Social Anthropology (Volos, Greece). He studied History at the National and Kapodestrian University of Athens and University of Sofia “Sv. Kliment Ohridski”. He has published on theory of History, contemporary visual culture, social history of information and historical culture in the digital domain.
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Pantelis Probonas
co-organizer & administrator

Pantelis Probonas (@pprobonas) is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly. He is working on a multi-sited ethnography about the politics of death and the disposal of refugees' dead bodies at the EU frontier. Mostly intrested in the body, politics of life an death, medical anthropology, borders and borderlands.

Christina Mitsopoulou
administrator

Christina Mitsopoulou, Archaeologist (Sorbonne Paris IV), PhD in Classical Archaeology (University of Athens) and Licensed Cultural Tour Guide (Athens), is Laboratory Teaching Staff at the University of Thessaly. She assists the PSL on an organizational level.

Athena Athanasiou
instructor

Athena Athanasiou teaches Social Anthropology and Gender Theory at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens. She has authored the books: Life at the Limit: Essays on Gender, Body and Biopolitics (Athens, 2007); Crisis as a ‘State of Exception’ (Athens, 2012); and she has co-authored (with Judith Butler) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Polity Press, 2013). She has also edited: Feminist Theory and Cultural Critique (Athens, 2006); Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and 'the Greeks' (co-ed. with Elena Tzelepis, SUNY Press, 2010); Biosocialities (Athens, 2011); Deconstructing the Empire: Theory and Politics of Postcolonial Studies (ed., Athens, 2016). Her new book Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black will be published by Edinburgh University Press (2017). She has been a fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, at Columbia University​​​

Pamila Gupta
​instructor

Pamila Gupta is Associate Professor at WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Columbia University. She writes about Lusophone India and Africa, Portuguese colonial and missionary history, decolonization, heritage tourism, visual cultures and islands in the Indian Ocean.  She has published in South African Historical Journal, African Studies, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Ler História, Ecologie & Politique, and Public Culture, and is the co-editor of Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean with Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson (UNISA, 2010). Her monograph entitled The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India was published by Manchester University Press (2014).  
http://wiser.wits.ac.za/users/pamila-gupta

Juan Orrantia
​instructor

Juan Orrantia (b. Colombia, resides South Africa) His work relies on the ambiguity of photography to explore the veracity of what or how we remember in the construction of narratives and meanings. Interested in contemporary approaches to documentary his practice is concerned with questions of memory, history and movement, resulting in experimental essays, installations and book forms usually combining formats, appropriated images, and text. For this he has received awards like the Tierney Fellowship in Photography, and exhibited in Berlin, Colombia and South Africa among others. http://www.juanorrantia.com/ ​

Elena Tzelepis
​instructor

Elena Tzelepis teaches and writes on political and social philosophy, aesthetics, and feminist theory. She currently teaches for the University of Athens. She completed her doctoral studies in philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. She has taught at Columbia University, New York, and has been a fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, and at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London. Among her publications are the co-edited volume Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‘the Greeks’ (with Athena Athanasiou, 2010, SUNY Press) and the edited volume Antigone’s Antinomies: Critical Readings of the Political (2014, in Greek).​​

Patricia Dailey
​instructor

Patricia Dailey is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and is the Director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. She specializes in medieval literature, philosophy, and  critical theory, focusing on women's mystical texts, and  Anglo-Saxon poetry and prose. Her book Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women's Mystical Texts (Columbia University Press, 2013) examines the relation between gender, temporality, the body, and language  with a focus on the thirteenth century mystic Hadewijch. Her next book project,  Responsive Subjects:  Affect and Anglo-Saxon Literature, focuses on Anglo-Saxon literature and the use of affect in medieval pedagogy. She has translated Agamben’s The Time That Remains, and essays by Lyotard, Negri, and Alliez.

Alexandros Kioupkiolis
​instructor

Dr Alexandros Kioupkiolis (B.A. Athens, M.A. Essex, DPhil Oxford) is Assistant Professor in Contemporary Political Theory in the School of Political Sciences,Aristotle University, Thessaloniki.
His research interests focus on modern philosophies of freedom, contemporary philosophies of justice, theories of democracy, conceptions and critiques of power, and the commons. He has published in papers in various journals, such as The European Journal of Political Theory, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Contemporary Political Theory. His publications include the books: 1.Freedom after the critique of foundations. Marx, liberalism, Castoriadis and agonistic autonomy, Palgrave-Macmillan, Hampshire, 2012.2. (co-edited with G. Katsambekis) Radical democracy and collective movements today. The biopolitics of the multitude versus the hegemony of the people, Ashgate, 2014.
He is an ERC grantee, conducting a comparative research project on the commons in Southern Europe (2017-2020).

Petros Petridis
​instructor

Petros Petridis holds a doctorate in Social Anthropology and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Greek Research Center for the Humanities. His main interests focus on the ethnographic research of digital culture. Specifically, his interests are in digital economies, file sharing and intellectual property rights, algorithmic cultures, gamification, fan cultures and the politics of knowledge in technosocialities such as Peer to Peer networks and Massively Multiplayer Online Games.​​

Dimitris Vardoulakis
​instructor

Dimitris Vardoulakis (Western Sydney University) is the author of The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (2010), Sovereignty and its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence (2013), Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (2016), and Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy (2017). He has also edited or co-edited numerous books, including Spinoza Now (2011) and Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger (2015). He is the director of “Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society” and the co-editor of the “Incitements” book series published by Edinburgh University Press​

​​For any questions regarding Pelion Summer Lab, please contact us at: pelionsummerlab@gmail.com