Aikaterini Markou

Aikaterini Markou is Assistant Professor at the Department of History and Ethnology of the Democritus University of Thrace. She studied at the Panteion University, Athens, and is a graduate of the Department of Political Science there. She completed her postgraduate studies at the University of Paris Χ-Nanterre, specializing in Contemporary Social Sciences: Sociology, Anthropology, History. In 2001 she received her PhD in Social and Historical Anthropology, at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She attended seminars at the Centre for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan and Central Asia Studies (CETOBAC) at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, while also attending seminars in Bulgarian Studies at the National Institute of Eastern Languages and Cultures (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales - INALCO) in Paris.
From 2002-2012 she taught at the Department of Sociology of the University of Crete and since September 2012 she has been teaching at the Department of History and Ethnology of Democritus University of Thrace. She has collaborated with the National Centre of Social Research (Greece) and with theInstitut d'Ethnologie Méditerranéene,Européenne et Comparative(IDEMEC). She has been doing ethnographic research in Thrace for years and she has expanded her field research to cover countries neighbouring on Greece. In 2006 she conducted research in Istanbul on education of Greeks (Rum millet) in Istanbul. In 2013 she organized a two-day conference entitled: Religious Tradition, Social and Political Aspects of Bektasism-Alevism in the Context of Contemporary Muslim world, Department of History and Ethnology, Democritus University of Thrace, in Komotini. In 2018 she organized an international conference entitled: Aspects of the Balkan Cities from 1990 to the Present: Space and People, Culture and Tourism, Department of History and Ethnology, in cooperation with the Laboratory of Folklore and Social Anthropology.
Her research interests include historical-social anthropology and ethnology of the Balkans and more specifically the methodology questions of the ethnographic research, ethnic identities in the Balkans, and even more specifically the study of Balkan Islam. She is also interested in issues of memory and space, in the social dimension of linguistic exchanges and in anthropology of the borders. Her more recent academic interests include the management of the Ottoman heritage in Greece and the anthropology of tourism.
Selective bibliography:
1) Recompositions and New Dynamics in Balkan Societies since 1990 (ed) (Herodotos, Athens, 2011, in greek), 2) Monuments and Culture of the Greek Cities during the Ottoman Period through the Texts of Machiel Kiel, Contribution to the Ottoman Heritage in the Greek Space (editing, introduction, comments) (Herodotos, 2015, in greek), 3) Post-Urbanities, Cultural Reconsiderations and Tourism in the Balkans (co-editing with Meglena Zlatkova) (Herodotos, under publication). She has also translated from French to Greek: 1) Jean Copans, Ethnological Research, (Gutenberg, Athens, 2004), 2) Fariba Adelkhah, François Georgeon, Ramadan and Politics (Herodotos, Athens, 2015). She is in charge of the Balkanica et Orientalia series, Herodotos, she has published numerous articles and studies in magazines, collective volumes, seminar records and she has participated in conferences both in Greece and abroad. She is a member of the Laboratory of Folklore and Social Anthropology of the Department of History and Ethnology, Democritus University of Thrace, member of the Hellenic Ethnology Association, of the Association of Oral History (Ε.Π.Ι.) and the Αssociation d’Anthropologie Méditerranéenne.