The John O. Iatrides Best Dissertation Prize is awarded on a biennial schedule for the best English-language dissertation on a Greek subject. The next prize will be awarded at the 2024 MGSA Symposium. The 2024 prize competition covers dissertations completed since the April 2022 deadline. 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.
Submissions of complete dissertations are accepted in electronic form only (pdf format).
Applicants also include the following information: the year of the dissertation’s acceptance and the names of the dissertation committee members and supervisor (the Dissertation Prize Committee excludes any dissertation supervisors or committee members of the applicants).
Prize: $1000.00 and one year membership in the MGSA; $500 toward travel expenses to attend the Symposium..
Faculty members in Modern Greek Studies are hereby asked to encourage their doctoral students to submit their completed dissertations.
[email protected]
Please send submissions by 1 April 2024.
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).
"The Whitening Process Model: Forging an Anti-Racist Praxis for Descendants of European Immigrants in the United States", University of Florida
"Crossing Regions, Nations, Empires. The Jews of Corfu and the Making of a Jewish Adriatic, 1850-1914". University of Washington, Post-Doc
“For Your Civilization and Ours: Greece, Romania, and the Making of French Universalism”, Indiana University 2016
“Nationness in the Absence of a Nation: Narrating the Prehistory of the Greek National Movement”
New York University, History, 2014
"Balkan Wars between the Lines: Violence and Civilians in Macedonia, 1912-1918."
University of Maryland, History, 2012
"Time on the Mountain: The Office of Strategic Services in Axis-Occupied Greece, 1943-1944. "
Kent State University, History 2011
"Between Two Motherlands: Struggles for Nationhood among the Greeks in
Bulgaria, 1906-1949"
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, History, 2007
"The Great Game of Improvements: European Diplomacy and the Reform of the Orthodox Church,"
University of Toronto, 2004.
"Transnational Beauty Culture and Local Bodies: an Ethnographic Account of Consumption and Identity in Urban Greece,"
University of California at Irvine, 2001
Honorable Mention
Leslie Glickman Kaplan
"'A Good Considerable Country Town': Visions of a Greek Village in European Travel Narrations,"
University of Pennsylvania, 2001
"Genres of Recollection: History, Testimony and Archive in Contemporary Greece," Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 2001
"Aristophanes in Modern Greece: From Textual Reception to Performance Dialectics," Classical and Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, 1995
Honorable Mention
Heather A Paxton
"Redefining Reproduction in Urban Greece: A Cultural Study of Fertility Control," Stanford University, 1997