John O. Iatrides Best Dissertation Prize

At the MGSA's Executive Board meeting in February 2005, it was resolved that the Best Dissertation Prize should be named in honor of John O. Iatrides, in recognition of his more than two decades of outstanding service as MGSA's Executive Director and his acclaimed contributions to the scholarship on Greece and the Balkans for the period beginning with World War II.

The John O. Iatrides Best Dissertation Prize is awarded on a biennial schedule for the best English-language dissertation on a Greek subject.

The John O. Iatrides Best Dissertation Prize Committee decided to award the 2007 prize to Dr. Theodora Dragostinova, for her dissertation entitled "Between Two Motherlands: Struggles for Nationhood among the Greeks in Bulgaria, 1906-1949."

Dr. Dragostinova's work is eminently deserving of the Iatrides Dissertation Prize. This promising junior scholar analyzes the history of the forgotten Bulgarian Greeks in the first half of the twentieth century and, in particular, the previously neglected Bulgarian perspective of the Balkan refugee and minority experience. Dr. Dragostinova has succeeded in making the results of her research and critical analysis pertinent to current global questions and cultural sensitivities: she has engaged with issues of nationhood and national movements, of refugee and minority problems, and of population management in general.

Dr. Dragostinova's dissertation is a meticulously researched work that is theoretically sound and that displays a discriminating command of archival and other long-ignored materials and a solid mastery of the unusual research languages required. In an exemplary scholarly fashion, Dr. Dragostinova has presented an interdisciplinary, critical analysis that is truly innovative but that also remains eminently readable and that holds the promise of becoming an exciting scholarly book. The MGSA committee members are delighted to welcome in Dr. Dragostinova a promising young scholar to the field: we look forward to seeing her work in print, in a study that will open new windows on the interdisciplinary concerns of Modern Greek Studies and of the MGSA.

All disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences compete together. Eligible for competition are dissertations completed at a North American institution, with English as a primary language and the post-Byzantine Greek world -- including Greek diasporas -- as a primary subject. In order to qualify for the competition, applicants must be current members of the Association when they submit their dissertations. A person may submit his/her dissertation only once within three years of completing the Ph.D.

About John Iatrides

John O. Iatrides was born in Thessaloniki and was educated in Greece, the Netherlands and the United States (Ph.D. international politics, Clark University, 1962). He served with the Hellenic National Defense General Staff as NATO liaison officer (1955-56) and the prime minister’s press office (1956-58). He taught courses on contemporary Greek politics at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, New York universities and the University of the Aegean and is Connecticut State University Professor Emeritus in Political Science. During 1980-2004 he served as executive director of the Modern Greek Studies Association and editor of the MGSA Bulletin.

His publications include Balkan Triangle. Birth and Decline of an Alliance Across Ideological Boundaries (1968), Revolt in Athens. The Greek Communist ‘Second Round,’ 1944-1945 (1972), Ambassador MacVeagh Reports, Greece 1933-1947 (1980) and numerous essays on the Greek wartime resistance,  civil war and US-Greek relations. He is co-author and editor of Greek-American Relations: A Critical Review (1980), Greece in the 1940s. A Nation in Crisis (1981), Studies in the History of the Greek Civil War (1987), Greece at the Crossroads. The Civil War and its Aftermath (1995), and The Aegean Sea after the Cold War. Security and Law of the Sea Issues (2000).
He and his wife Nancy make their home in Cheshire, CT.