Professor Georgios Anagnostou awarded Vasiliki Karagiannaki Prize for the Best Edited Volume in Modern Greek Studies
Georgios Anagnostou has been awarded as a recipient of the Vasiliki Karagiannaki Prize for the Best Edited Volume in Modern Greek Studies for his work on Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation
The Vasiliki Karagiannaki Prize for the Best Edited Volume is awarded on a biennial basis to the best edited volume written in English with significant content in the field of Modern Greek Studies.
This important volume studies Greek Americans and Italian Americans not as singular ethnic groups but relationally and comparatively with attention to interactions and intersections. The authors are scholars whose work lies either in Modern Greek studies or in Italian American studies. Each author embraces the call to bring the two fields of study into conversation.
Reasons for studying the two groups comparatively are historical and methodological. Historically, Greeks and Italians follow parallel immigration paths beginning in the late 19th century down to their claims of a singular, white-American ethnicity in the post-civil rights era and their complicating those claims today. The articles in the book toggle between examples of the two groups' expressive culture to bring out convergences, divergences, and alternatives. Methodologically, the book addresses a gap in ethnic American studies, which tends to take a single group approach and to lump together white ethnics as a hegemonic group that does not merit attention. Greek American studies does not have an academic presence, and Italian American studies is an entity unto itself. The book pries open a new scholarly space for the two fields in dialogue.
