The 29^TH MGSA SYMPOSIUM

Symposium 2026 Keynote Speaker

Michael Herzfeld, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, has served as president of the MGSA and editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. Born and raised in the United Kingdom, he was educated at the Universities of Cambridge (B.A., 1969), Birmingham (M.A., 1972; D.Litt., 1989), and Oxford (D.Phil., 1976); he has also spent a year as a non-degree student at the University of Athens. Noted for his writings on modern Greece, he has also conducted research in Italy and Thailand and has been a consistent advocate for the importance of seeing the history, culture, and society of Greece in multiple comparative frames. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Crete and Macedonia (Thessaloniki) as well as the Université Libre de Bruxelles and St Andrews University. He has held visiting appointments in Australia, Mainland China, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. He briefly chaired the Modern Greek program at Harvard, where he also served as the first and founding Director of the Asia Center’s Thai Studies Program.  He is also a member of the Collegio del Dottorato di ricerca in Beni Culturali, Formazione e Territorio, Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”; IIAS Professor of Critical Heritage Studies Emeritus, Leiden University; and Senior Advisor, Critical Heritage Studies Initiative, International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden. In 2021 he was made an honorary citizen of Greece for services to the promotion of social science research on that country.

Herzfeld is the author of 14 books (many of them with a Greek focus and the most recent one, published by the Benaki Museum, in Greek), two ethnographic films about Rome, and numerous articles and reviews. In his anthropological role, he has served as president of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe and editor of American Ethnologist. Currently a co-editor of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, he also co-directs two book series (“Asian Heritages,” previously at Amsterdam University Press and now at Routledge, and “New Anthropologies of Europe” at Berghahn Books). Herzfeld is also editor-at-large (responsible for the article series “Polyglot Perspectives”) at Anthropological Quarterly. 

A recipient of several prestigious awards and fellowships, Herzfeld has conducted active research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand since his student days in the late 1960s. His early research on Greek folklore and the history of folklore studies in Greece formed the basis of his first book, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece (1982, reissued in an expanded edition in 2020 by Berghahn). His work has addressed masculinity and gender more generally, the social and political impact of historic conservation and gentrification, the dynamics of nationalism and bureaucracy, critical approaches to heritage studies, anthropological ethics, crypto-colonialism, and the ethnography of knowledge among artisans and intellectuals.  He remains actively engaged in research and writing and recently guest-edited a special issue of Anthropology Today on anthropology and the bureaucratization of research ethics. He has also contributed op-ed articles on cultural and political issues to Το Βήμα, Καθημερινή, and, most recently, Εφημερίδα των Συντακτών. A critical analyst of ethnonationalism and its social consequences, he regards social anthropology as a necessarily political, and politically engaged, discipline, especially in its ability to bring scholarly knowledge to bear against racial and other forms of collective discrimination.