Alex Papadopoulos joined the Geography faculty at DePaul University, Chicago, in 1992 and helped transform the Department into a nationally recognized undergraduate program. He has received the Excellence in Teaching Award and the Cortelyou-Lowery Award for Excellence (his College’s senior award for excellence in teaching, research, and service). In 2019 the American Association of Geographers awarded him its highest teaching honor, the Harm de Blij Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Alex describes himself as a ‘teacher-scholar.’ His most important work is teaching and mentoring his students and introducing them to ways of knowing through fieldwork and research. As an urban and political geographer, Alex’s scholarship is informed by critical, comparative, and applied approaches to urban geography and planning, geopolitics, heritage/legacy built environments, and geographies of sexual difference. In this work, the changing character of state power speaks to the regulation and transformation of urban space, the political-spatial organization of cities, the construction of urban-ethnic identities, and the framing of privacy in cities in the context of contested performances of sexual difference. His research has explored as diverse topics as Greek statecraft’s entanglements with the geopolitics of difference, urban cultures of resistance and exclusion in post-Tanzimat Istanbul, the emergence of “global” Brussels in the age of European integration, the resuscitation of commercial spaces in post-Soviet Saint Petersburg, and the geographies of same-sex desire in modern Athens. The connective tissue and theoretical affinities of these very different scholarly endeavors are an abiding concern over the urban-spatial implications of state power. Alex’s most recent book publication (with historian Triantafyllos Petridis) is Hellenic Statecraft and the Geopolitics of Difference, Routledge, 2021. They explored the constitution of the modern State and Greek society through ideas and social facts that produced competing ontologies of Hellenism and Hellenicity: ideas about national origins, manifest destiny, cultural hierarchy, exceptionalism, privilege, and difference; social facts expressed as formal or informal norms, processes, and practices, affirming or disrupting the exercise of power and social and territorial control. Difference becomes the crucible upon which institutional actors and subjects sort their relationship to state, nation, and liberty. Accepting that difference exists in the state enables subaltern communities to claim a place in politics and engage in contestatory politics. Alex is currently completing the co-authored/co-edited collection (with geographers LaToya Eaves and Heidi J Nast) titled Spatial Futures: Difference in the Post-Anthropocene (Palgrave, 2023). The Ionian (Ionio) University has invited Alex to teach and carry out collaborative research on Anthropocene threats to tangible and intangible cultural heritage(s). The project contributes to Ionian’s partnership with UNESCO. His work includes curriculum design, the development and teaching of coursework on spatial methods of threat assessment, research on a threats/risk mitigation spatial model and rubric, and scientific expertise to standing committees that manage the Ionian U - UNESCO ‘threats’ project.

Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, memoirist, critic, editor, and visual artist. Her first book of poems, The Real Tin Flower (Crowell-Collier, 1968), was published when she was 12 years old, with a foreword by Anne Sexton. In 2014, Carnegie-Mellon University Press reissued her book, Madly in Love, as a Carnegie-Mellon Classic Contemporary, a series dedicated to reprinting the work of the America’s most important poets. She is the author of nine books of poetry including Wild With It (Sheep Meadow, 2002), Dear God Dear, Dr. Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow, 2009), Bright Body (White Pine, 2011), Dwelling (Sheep Meadow, 2016), and Eva’s Voice, a bilingual edition translated by Liana Sakelliou (Vakhikon Publications, 2022). Eva’s Voice, written in the voice of a Sephardic Jew from Thessaloniki who survives the Holocaust, is the resulting book from Barnstone’s 2006 Fulbright Award. She translated has published two volumes of poetry from the Modern Greek: The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy: A New Translation (W.W. Norton, 2006) and Liana Sakelliou’s Portrait Before Dark (St. Julian Press, 2022). Her poems, creative nonfiction, and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Brevity, Crab Orchard Review, Flash Boulevard, New Letters, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. The co-founder and former series editor of The Cliff Becker Book Award in Translation, she has served twice as a judge on translation panels for the National Endowment for the Arts. She edited A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (Schocken,1980; 2nd edition, 1992), which remains the most comprehensive anthology of international poetry in English, and the Shambhala Anthology of Women’s Spiritual Poetry (Shambhala, 2002). Her literary critical work includes the introduction and readers’ notes for H.D.’s Trilogy, co-editing The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era, and her study, Changing Rapture: The Development of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry (University Press of New England, 2007). Among her awards are two Fulbright Fellowships in Greece (2006 and 2022), the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and residencies at the Anderson Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is Professor of English at the University of Missouri and served as poet laureate of Missouri from 2016-2019. As a Fulbright Scholar in 2023, Barnstone will complete Things that Changed our Shape: Poems & Prose of the Greek Junta, a hybrid book of poems and short-form prose, which deals with the experience of the Greek military junta (1967-1974) from a personal, familial, and historical perspective. Having lived under tyranny, Barnstone feels an ethical imperative to bear witness, an imperative intensified by the global rise of brutal dictatorships. Barnstone’s mother is Greek. She experienced the junta in Greece and from afar among exiles in the U.S. Barnstone’s family spent her 13th year in Athens in 1969-70 and she returned in 1974 just before the regime fell. She has vivid, haunting memories of living in Greece under the colonels. The Greek junta is only very sparsely explored in literature. Because of the spread of authoritarian rule and because strongmen have similar playbooks, there is a need to account for this era in literature and art. Barnstone’s University of Athens Colleague, Dr. Liana Sakelliou, who is her age, is also writing about her memories of that era. They will continue their project of translating each other, working both independently and synergistically. Uniquely positioned as literary figures in both Greece and the U.S., Barnstone and Sakelliou seek to fill the gap and contribute to the artistic recounting of that history in both Greek and English.

Jason Francisco (born 1967, California) is an artist and essayist. Joining documentary and conceptual art, his photoworks and writings focus on the complications of historical memory, and new directions in the art of witness. Much of his work concerns the inheritance of trauma, specifically concerning Jewish experience in eastern Europe. Francisco's large-scale projects include Alive and Destroyed: A Meditation on the Holocaust in Time (Daylight Books, 2021), The Camp in its Afterlives (2010-2018), An Unfinished Memory (2014-2018), After the American Century (2002-2018), Big City (1989-2022), Far from Zion: Jews, Diaspora, Memory (Stanford University Press, 2006), and The Villages: Rural India at the End of the Twentieth Century (1990-1997). He is also the author of numerous limited edition photobooks, web-based installations, experimental films, hybrid photo-text writings, reportages, essays, and poems in translation. This website contains some 200 of his works made between 1990 and 2022. Francisco co-founded FestivALT, an annual festival of experimental Jewish art, performance and activism in Kraków, Poland, and served as co-director in its first years. At Emory University, Francisco is a member of the Film and Media department. He received his education at Columbia University, King's College London, and Stanford University. His Fulbright project in Greece concerns intercultural history in Chania.

Dr. Kristian Stewart is a collegiate lecturer and King-Chávez-Parks Future Faculty Fellow in the Department of Language, Culture, and the Arts at the University of Michigan Dearborn, USA. Kristi is a digital storytelling and literacy practitioner; and in this context, she conducts research around digital storytelling, “glocal” literacy, transnational course collaboration and design, and critical and discomforting pedagogies as methods to reshape and decolonize writing curriculum. She has authored several peer-reviewed/refereed articles and book chapters in these areas. In 2021, Kristi was nominated and won the Dearborn campus Collegiate Lectureship Teaching Award for the outstanding instruction of writing. Kristi’s interests lean toward developing curriculum that foregrounds intercultural awareness and social justice as vital to the writing process. The project Kristi is bringing to Greece is a digital storytelling curriculum and theme-based writing class that she developed for her American students called "Being Human Today." The overriding themes of this course service diversity, inclusion, and advancing digital literacy as fundamental for social justice education. This class features a humanizing pedagogy that alters the way students connect with each other, increases student fluency in English and writing, and encourages a measure of empathy and care, what Kristi calls “better human skills,” for the students who take the class. “Being Human Today” enhances cultural understanding and provides a space for students to learn about the ideas and values of others, which is essential in our increasingly divided world. The goal of Kristi’s Fulbright term will be to develop a shared curriculum that joins her US students with Peloponnese students through “Being Human Today”. This curriculum will not only “expose” Greek and American students to each other and nurture cross-culture understanding, but it will aid in increasing both student cohorts' fluency in writing and/or English. It is Kristi's goal after her Fulbright to offer classes / and or assignment sequences that link American and Greek students through digital platforms like WhatsApp, TED ED, or Zoom. This collaboration will ultimately promote 21st century learning skills, building relationships, and communicating across difference.