About the Speakers
Mark Mazower is a historian and writer, specializing in modern Greece, 20th century Europe, and international history. He read classics and philosophy at Oxford, studied international affairs at Johns Hopkins University's Bologna Center, and has a doctorate in modern history from Oxford (1988). His books include Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44(1993); Dark Continent: Europe's 20th Century (1998); The Balkans (2000); and After the War was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943-1960 (2000). His Salonica City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 (2004) was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize. In 2008, he published Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe which won that year’s LA Times Book Prize for History. His most recent book is No Enchanted Palace: the End of Empire (2009), and he is currently working on a history of internationalism.
Naeem Mohaiemen combines photography, films, archives, and essays to research the many forms of utopia-dystopia (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings)– beginning from Bangladesh’s two postcolonial markers (1947, 1971) and then radiating outward to unlikely, and unstable, transnational alliances and collisions. Despite underlining a historic tendency toward misrecognition of allies, the hope for a future international left, as an alternative to current silos of race and religion, is always a basis for the work. A throughline in all his work is family unit as locus for pain-beauty dyads, abandoned buildings as staging ground for lost souls, and the necessity of small prevarications to keep on living. He is an associate professor and the Concentration Head of Photography at Columbia University School of the Arts.
Neni Panourgiá is the Academic Adviser at the JIE Scholars Program. Her work centers on confinement in all its forms, from the benevolent (hospitals, schools) to the sinister (concentration camps and prisons). She is the author and editor of multiple award-winning books and articles on the subject, most recently Foucauld’s Node: Leros and the Grammar of Confinement. Since 2022, she has co-organized and co-directed the Leros Humanism Seminars.
Aurelie Vialette is an associate professor and the Acting Director of Undergraduate Studies for Spanish 2024-25 at Yalue University. She specializes in 19th-century Iberian cultural studies: carceral studies, disability studies, transatlantic studies, slavery networks, Filipino studies, popular music, journalistic discourse, archival studies, mass and working-class organizations, and Catalan Studies. Her book, Intellectual Philanthropy: The Seduction of the Masses (Purdue University Press, 2018; Recipient of the North American Catalan Society Prize for Outstanding Work in the Field of Catalan Studies, 2019), challenges the conventional cultural and intellectual history of the relationship between bourgeois intellectuals and the working class in modern Iberia by analyzing philanthropic projects addressed to industrial workers.
