Alexander Kitroeff

Biography

Alexander Kitroeff was born in Athens, Greece and was educated in the United Kingdom where he received a B.A. in Politics at Warwick University in 1977, an M.A. in History at Keele University in 1979 and a D.Phil. in Modern History at Oxford University in 1984. His doctoral dissertation, completed at St. Antony's College, examined the history of the Greek diaspora in Egypt between the two world wars. Kitroeff was an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Center for Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies at Queens College CUNY between 1986-1989, Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University in 1987, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Temple University in 1989-1990 and Assistant Professor in the Department of History & the Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies at New York University between 1990-1996. In 1996 he began teaching at Haverford College, where he is presently Associate Professor of History.

Education

B.A., University of Warwick, United Kingdom

M.A., University of Keele, United Kingdom

D.Phil., Oxford University

Research

The study of nationalism and ethnicity in Greece and its diaspora in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the cornerstone of my intellectual pursuits and research as well as publishing activities. I am particularly interested in understanding the interplay between Greek homeland nationalism and ethnicity in the Greek diaspora. Towards that purpose, my work as a historian has focused on changing definitions of Greekness as expressed within diaspora communities (beginning with the Greeks in Egypt and moving on to the Greeks in the United States and the Americas), within the Greek homeland itself, and also through the dynamic of Greek homeland-diaspora relations. My work on Greek identity in the diaspora includes my doctoral dissertation completed at Oxford in 1984 which focused on the Greek community in Egypt and its responses to the rise of Egyptian nationalism between 1919 and 1937, the year foreign privileges began being dismantled. Since then I moved on to examining the history of the Greeks in the United States as well as the Greeks in Canada and in Latin America. I have published a series of chapters in books and articles on the history of the Greek Americans and I am currently continuing my research in this area. I am planning a history of the Greek presence in the United States and a series of biographical studies of Greek Americans. I have examined Greekness and its definitions within Greece in two spheres. The first is the ways the Greeks defined their identity in the context of the pursuit of the “Great Idea” the project of unification of the Greek lands beginning with the Greek revolution of 1821 and concluding at the Lausanne Conference of 1923. I am in the process of updating and completing a manuscript that accounts for the evolution of Greek identity during that era and explains how Greece’s cultural nationalism was shaped by the requirements of achieving Europeanization and progress. I have also studied the history of Greekness is through an examination of how it was shaped in the context of Greece’s role in the international Olympic movement. This study appeared in book form, entitled Wrestling With the Ancients: Modern Greek Identity and the Olympics and was published by Greekworks, NY in 2004.

Courses: Fall 2013, Haverford

Courses: Spring 2014, Haverford