PSL7 COHORT

Nina Alexandraki was born in Athens. She studied philosophy and film in Brussels. She directed "Diary of a Sexual Solitude" (2022) and co-directed with Lefteris Panagiotou "I’m Outside" (2023).

Arie Amaya-Akkermans is a writer, researcher and art critic, working on the intersection between contemporary art and archaeology, with a particular focus on the Eastern Mediterranean. His curated museum exhibition, After Utopia: The Birds (2022), at Sadberk Hanim Museum in Istanbul, was the first contemporary art project at an archaeological museum in Turkey, followed by research stays, residencies, interventions and group exhibitions in Italy, Greece and Cyprus. His forthcoming monograph, "On Contemporary Art, Archaeology and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean" (in press), will be the first book devoted to the relationship between contemporary art and archaeology in the region. He is currently completing a masters degree in philosophy at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies. 

Panushkaran Arasaretnam
I am from Kathiraveli, a coastal village in eastern Sri Lanka. I grew up surrounded by the sea, and paddy fields, and my connection to nature has deeply shaped my way of understanding the world. At the same time, my childhood was marked by displacement and the experiences of the civil war, which strongly influenced my interest in space, memory and social justice. I studied Geography in Sri Lanka and at Delhi University. Currently, I am pursuing an MA in Modern Indian Studies at Göttingen University. Alongside my academic journey, I have been working with youth in Sri Lanka for many years through leadership development, critical thinking classes, mentoring, and sports-based environmental programs. I am passionate about collective learning and community-centered social change. I also enjoy reading philosophy and writing poetry.

Abdul Aijaz is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work explores the entanglements between cultural narratives and material worlds, and the ways they shape and transform one another. His research focuses particularly on narratives of environmental crisis, ecological scarcity, and political struggles over water commons in Punjab, Pakistan. His previous work examined how modern aesthetics and politics under British colonial rule reshaped both the physical landscape and the literary and cultural life of Punjab. Themes of environmental justice, epistemic equality, and the pursuit of just futures continue to inform both his research and pedagogy.

Archie Davies is a cultural and historical geographer. His research addresses historical geographies of space, metabolism, nature and the body. He is currently working on projects on the meat industry, pain, and Brazilian quilombos. Along with archival work, he is a translator of Brazilian radical thought, and is experimenting with film and collaborative methods. He works at Queen Mary University of London.

Aris Dougas Chavarria is a PhD researcher in Migration Studies at the University of Sussex. Ηis project investigates the disappearance of migrants at sea trying to reach the Canary Islands. He is interested in borders(capes), migration/mobilities, islands/archipelagos, the more-than-human, community responses, violence and the witnessing of it, mainly through ethnographic, sensorial, and creative methods. Aris holds a BA in Global Studies from the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and an MA in Southeast European Studies from the University of Graz. He has spent mobility stays at the HSE in Saint Petersburg, and the universities of Rijeka, Sarajevo and Zadar. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals and has been presented at several conferences and workshops. He is of Catalan/Greek descent and speaks nine languages. His alter ego is involved in a project on language learning and teaching with technology at the European Centre for Modern Languages.

Müge Gedik is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature. Her doctoral research in environmental humanities integrates feminist theory, ecocriticism, and contemporary Turkish and hemispheric American literatures to explore how water narratives from the Turkish coast of the Eastern Mediterranean and Caribbean contexts illuminate relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. She studies how literature and film document the shift from small-scale to industrial fishing, portrays islands as sites of ecological resilience, and imagines climate futures grounded in reciprocity and justice. Bridging comparative literary studies, environmental history, and sustainability science and practice, her work investigates how stories about water, animals, and technology can function as cultural resources, foster environmental awareness, and contribute to intergenerational well-being.

Laya Geramizadegan is a PhD researcher in Cultural Heritage at the University of Turku, Finland. Her research focuses on Iranian women, visual culture, clothing, and acts of resistance connected to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. She graduated in Costume Design for Performing Arts and Film from Aalto University and in Play Directing from the Art University of Tehran. Alongside her academic work, she has designed, directed, and performed in theater and film projects in Iran and Finland. Her interdisciplinary work combines artistic practice, cultural heritage, and feminist perspectives.

Annagrazia ​Graduato is an Italian anthropologist and filmmaker based in Brussels. She is interested in exploring the relationships between humans and the environment, ecological transformations, and memory. Working with both digital and analogue film and photography, she develops projects that engage with landscapes and the ways images can question dominant narratives and reshape our ways of perceiving and relating to the world. Alongside her artistic practice, she is also involved in documentary film programming and research.

Sophia Hatzikos is an artist whose practice is rooted in embodied research through swimming, translating sensorial experiences within hydroscapes into sculpture. She earned a BA from Wheaton College and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, MO and Pacific University, OR. Her practice has been supported through grants and fellowships including the Future Fund, Divided City Fellowship, Sam Fox Post-MFA Studio Fellowship, Ann W. Olin and Spencer T. Olin Fellowships, Davis International Fellowship, and the Projects for Peace Award.

Fiona Hoffer is an interdisciplinary artist with an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Their recent work uses endoscopic video and sculpture to explore borders as physical and ideological constructions imposed upon landscapes and people. They are interested in how waterways and borders are co-constructed in service of state and capital, and how notions of the “natural” mystify borders’ related human and ecological violences. Beyond
their art practice, they have experience as a community organizer with prison abolition and socialist organizations. They are a proud union member of the University of Michigan’s Graduate Employee’s Organization and an incoming doctoral student in Romance Languages and Literatures.

Sirrah Isis Hamann (they/she) is a researcher and writer interested in the spaces between environmental humanities/media, science and technology studies and critical geography. They hold a BA in Digital Media and Philosophy (2023) from Leuphana University Lüneburg and an MA in Environment and Society (2026) from the Rachel Carson Center at LMU Munich. Centered on the North Sea and its global entanglements, their current work explores coasts as weathering oil spaces to think/feel with change and resistance alongside industrial disturbance and control. They strive to ground their practice in humility and reciprocity, combining critical cartography and artistic research with activism and civic engagement

Mel Kalfanti (they/them) is a part-time anthropologist, part-time sailor, part-time baker, part-time film curator and part-time olive farmer. They completed their PhD thesis in the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly, writing an autoethnography on queer self-defense and the reappropriation of violence. They hold a Master's Degree in Gender, Society and Politics and a Bachelor's in Communication, Media and Culture, both from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. Their research interests keep expanding and are currently related to queer and postcolonial theory, autoethnography and digital and media anthropology. While seeking their next steps in academia, they spend their time cycling, convincing people to leave the urban life, tending to their garden and olive trees, and going on hikes with their life partner, their dog, Lou.

Elena - Konstantina Kalle
I am currently a Master’s student in Migration Studies at EHESS, working with refugee support initiatives. My research focuses on the temporality of migration control, particularly how waiting and acceleration coexist as forms of biopolitical power in encampment spaces, producing forms of immobility within broader regimes of mobility. I also hold a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, with a focus on postcolonial and reception theory. I am interested in interdisciplinary approaches connecting critical theory, ethnography, and lived experience, and in how storytelling engages with migration and displacement. My research also draws on fieldwork-based methods, including teaching and participant observation, to connect theory and lived realities.

Dimitra Karvouni (she/her) is a graduate of the Department of Culture,
Creative Media and Industries at the University of Thessaly. She has
engaged in an interdisciplinary approach to history, theory and practice,
integrating research and creation, oral expression, critical analysis and
writing on issues concerning culture, performance, anthropology,
intercultural theory, tourism, arts, curation, digital technologies, among
others. She is master’s student in the postgraduate programme Mobility
Studies in the Department of History, Archaeology and Social
Anthropology at the University of Thessaly, where she investigates
mobility as a concept in its multiple dimensions and various aspects,
theoretically and practically. She is keen on attending in labs, exhibitions,
events, workshops with cultural and humanitarian themes.

Elisávet Makridis is a cross-disciplinary poet, educator, and Cornell University MFA graduate where she taught as an award-winning lecturer. Winner of Grist's 2025 ProForma Contest in Hybrid Writing, her poetry has been published in, or is forthcoming from, RHINO, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, amongst others. Her work was most recently selected as a semifinalist for the Fall 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition, runner-up for Black Warrior Review’s Experimental Forms Contest judged by George Abraham, and shortlisted for The 2026 Propel Cambridge Poetry Prize by Bhanu Kapil.

Richard Müller is a practice-related PhD student at University College London’s Department of Geography with secondary supervision within the Slade School of Fine Art. His doctoral research, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, focuses on everyday practices that take place beyond the realm of formal or official systems within Hsinchu, Taiwan and Chennai, India. This mode of comparative urbanisms is initiated at the intersection of geographical discourses and practice-based methodologies, emphasising inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration. For more information, please visit: www.latentspace.com

Genta Nishku is a writer, researcher, and translator from Tirana, now living in New York City. In her academic and creative work, she explores questions of trauma, violence, resistance, and their memorialization. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, where her research examined the establishment of trauma as the primary framing device for contemporary literature from Albania and the former Yugoslavia. Her poetry and fiction deal with the entanglements of historical injustice and the strangeness of daily life, and have been published widely.

My name is Romane Pierlovisi, I am a second-year PhD candidate in Early Modern History at the Università di Corsica Pasquale Paoli, co-supervised by Christophe Luzi and Mathieu Grenet. My research stands at the intersection of history and comparative literature. My dissertation, Knowing and Governing Genoese Corsica: Travel Narratives, Diplomatic Writings, and Chancery Texts in the Challenge of Insularity (16th century), explores how the Republic of Genoa produced both literary and administrative knowledge to understand and
govern its island territory. By comparing humanist travel narratives with archival and cartographic sources, I seek to reassess Corsica’s place within the Genoese imperial framework and to examine how early modern writers conceptualized insular governance, power, and identity. I am particularly interested in the connections between writing and administration, and in how narrative forms shaped the political imagination of Mediterranean space.

Virga Popovaitė (PhD) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland. Her research applies a new materialist lens to explore more-than-human encounters in the Arctic, such as how various elements – weather, technology, and infrastructure – shape mobility practices and relations with the surroundings. Currently, Virga focuses on shipping practices and infrastructure in the Bothnian Bay and the responsible use of artificial intelligence as well as weather encounters experienced by tour operators, rescue services, and weather monitoring infrastructure in the Icelandic Highlands.

Alexandra Reza teaches Comparative Literatures and Cultures at Bristol University and has written widely about the connections between culture, poetics and politics in the conjuncture of decolonization. Her book, Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the End of Empire (OUP: 2024), analyses the transnational geographies of literary journals that connected francophone, lusophone and anglophone anticolonial poets, activists and other writers in the 1950s and 1960s, and considers the particularity of the literary journal as a literary form. Her current research focusses on radical cinema at the end of empire. 

Christina Shammas (she/her) is a student at UCL, completing her MSc in Environment, Politics and Society. Her research has a particular focus on Lebanon, and its diaspora, exploring the intersections of ecology, energy, conflict, culture and aesthetics. Her bachelor’s dissertation examined the environmental impacts of white phosphorus munitions in South Lebanon, while her current work explores the ways in which beauty and petrocultures are intertwined. She is increasingly incorporating artistic methodologies, such as photography and sound, into her research practice.

Domenico Maria Sparaco is a PhD candidate in Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Siena. His research focuses on the social and political dynamics catalysed by the COVID-19 pandemic. His current doctoral research is an ethnographic study of the "free-vax" movements that emerged after the COVID-19 vaccination campaign. In addition to my academic research, he is also involved in filmmaking, analogue photography and sonic experimentation, exploring hybrid forms of ethnographic expression beyond written text. He participated in the Spotlight Summer School on
Documentary Filmmaking in Social Sciences, which resulted in collaborative short films focused on more-than-human perspectives.

Caterina Stamou is an independent curator, poet and researcher, currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of English Language and Culture of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her academic research examines the poetics and politics of repair in localized contexts and art practices across different geographies, approached through feminist and anticolonial epistemologies. Through exhibitions, writing, zinemaking and collaborative projects, her practice explores the lesser-visible entanglements between language, lived experiences, affect and politics. She has presented her work in various contexts, including the Center for Book Arts NYC, the Contemporary Greek Art Institute (ISET), the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research in Athens, and the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar.

R. Caroline Stampliaka completed both her Bachelor of Arts with Honours and Master of Arts in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. During her master's studies, she specialized in Environmental Anthropology, conducted ethnographic research on Greek nomadic beekeeping, and will continue her research at the doctoral level at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include traditional ecological knowledge systems, political ecology, multispecies ethnography, anthropology of food systems, oral histories, and the expressive culture of the Mediterranean, with a geographical focus on Southern Europe and Greece.

Eylem Taylan is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is specialized in the subfields of political sociology, development, and sociological theory. Her dissertation research explores life, labor, and contentious politics at the port of Piraeus (Greece) after its acquisition by the Chinese state capital in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.

Nori Tsouloucha (Athens, GR) is a visual and performance artist working with participatory processes that center embodiment, trauma, queer experience, and political action. With a background in visual arts, their practice includes collective creation with local communities, facilitating performative workshops in Athens, and artistic research. In an extension of their practice, they have authored art books, produced curatorial texts and exhibition materials, conceptualized exhibitions, and operated digital marketing for art galleries in Greece. Nori has completed their BA in Visual Arts and their MA in Performing Public Space, and has received training in Performance Art from the National Theater of Greece.

Elena GV Torres has for the last decade been dedicated to the study of coloniality and the social suturing of race/place in the Hispanophone Caribbean. Before entering the academy, she worked various odd jobs including as a fieldhand for an archaeological dig in Mexico and as a farmworker in California. In 2020 she obtained a Fulbright for study in Belém do Pará, Brazil, and pursued a Master’s in Latin American Studies in New Orleans (2020-2022). She is currently pursuing a doctorate in anthropology in the city of New York, receiving the Hurston-Deloria Fellowship in Anthropology to complete her studies (2024-). She has written extensively on the question of post-military futures on Vieques, Puerto Rico and more recently xenophobia/philia in the Canary Islands, Spain.

Man Po Wong 
I am a cultural geographer pursuing MSc Urban Studies in University College London, and a musician from Hong Kong. As a researcher I am mainly interested in (popular) music, sound, cultural identity, and topics about Hong Kong. I have researched on shifting representations of Hong Kong throughout its late colonial history in its pop music culture. As a musician, and more specifically an amateur composer, my music training is mainly based on European classical-contemporary/experimental music, and electronic music production. I do film soundtrack production as a side job and interest. I also incorporate sound/music production as my creative research practice.