The winner of this year’s John O. Iatrides Best Dissertation Prize is Julia Tulke (Emory University) for “Artist-Run Athens: Mapping Spaces of Critical Practice between Two Crises, 2009-2022,” a 2023 dissertation from the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, at the University of Rochester in New York.
Honorable mention goes to Aytek Soner Alpan, for his “Trajectories of Displacement: A Comparative Historical Analysis of the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange,” a dissertation from the History Department of University of California, San Diego.
The three members of the Iatrides Prize committee were Othon Alexandrakis (York University), Tassos Kaplanis (University of Thessaloniki) and chair Roland Moore (Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. They agreed that the quality of all the applicants’ dissertations this year was exemplary. Most notably, the honorable mention features Alpan’s fresh comparative view, which bridges rather than separates Greece and Turkey through the lens of its respective refugee experiences, in the wake of the Treaty of Lausanne a century ago.
Tulke’s winning dissertation introduces the novel concept of "crisis creativity," which the committee found particularly compelling. The work was well-written, and her exploration of creativity and the commons was both engaging and highly productive. Her framing of crisis-era Athens as a site not only of struggle but also of vibrant artistic experimentation was especially insightful. The committee was inspired by the dissertation’s originality, contemporaneity, richness of material explored and provided, as well as its careful attention to gender as a significant dimension of artistic responses to crisis.
The award comes with a prize of $1000, a one year membership in the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA) and $500 toward travel expenses to attend the Symposium. It will be presented at the Award Ceremony of the 28th MGSA Symposium on Thursday, October 17, 2024, in Princeton, NJ.
The prize honors John O. Iatrides, who was born in Thessaloniki and was educated in Greece, the Netherlands and the United States (Ph.D. International politics, Clark University, 1962). He served with the Hellenic National Defense General Staff as NATO liaison officer (1955-56) and the prime minister’s press office (1956-58). He taught courses on contemporary Greek politics at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, New York universities and the University of the Aegean and is Connecticut State University Professor Emeritus in Political Science. During 1980-2004 he served as executive director of the Modern Greek Studies Association and editor of the MGSA Bulletin.