About me
I am an anthropologist, photographer, and compulsive traveller. I was born in Greece, where I lived until my early 20s. I studied at the Universities of Thessaloniki and Aarhus, and in 2007 I received my PhD in Anthropology from the Institute of Cognition and Culture, at Queen’s University Belfast. My dissertation, based on 16 months of fieldwork in Greece and Bulgaria, was an ethnography of the fire-walking rituals performed by the communities of the Anastenaria. After completing my PhD, I held postdoctoral positions at the universities of Princeton and Aarhus. During these appointments, I conducted further ethnographic fieldwork, studying fire-walking rituals in Spain and Mauritius. I currently hold a joint position between Aarhus University and Masaryk University, where I am co-director of the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion (LEVYNA).
My main interest is in understanding the effects of emotionally and physiologically arousing rituals on a personal cognitive/motivational as well as a group/socio-cultural level. Over the last few years, I have been concerned with developing a methodology to study such rituals experimentally in their natural contexts, incorporating experimental methods into ethnographic fieldwork.
Apart from my academic pursuits, I have worked as a freelance editor, translator, and photographer. I have translated several academic books on various subjects related to the Humanities, the Social Sciences, Psychology, and Evolutionary theory (see my translations). I speak Greek, English, Spanish, Italian and French, and I am currently learning Danish.
My hobbies include travelling, photography, and computers. I take my all of my hobbies quite seriously!
Travelling is my greatest passion and I am constantly on the move, both for business and pleasure. To this day, I have lived in 7 different countries and visited almost 50. I have taken almost every means of transportation, from donkey to helicopter to hot air balloon. One of my biggest (and perhaps less realistic) goals in life is to visit every country on the planet!
During the past few years I have acquired a passion for photography. My favourite subjects are wildlife, landscapes, and field photography. I currently use a Nikon D7000. My pictures have been published by the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, El Mundo, SNOB Magazine Russia, and others. You can see some of my pictures from the field in my photography section, and some more on Shutterpoint.
Computers have fascinated me ever since my father brought home a PC with no hard drive and 4kB (yes, KiloBytes!) of RAM —a then state-of-the-art machine! It was before the graphical user interface became widely available, so I briefly got into programming during my teenage years. At that time, I seriously contemplated studying computer science, but finally went on to join the humanities. After exploring the unreliable world of Windows for many years, I became a big Macintosh fan. This website, of course, has been designed on a Mac.