Hellenic American University is pleased to be co-organizing and hosting the 22nd biennial conference of the International Lawrence Durrell Society (ILDS) On Miracle Ground XXII on July 4 – 6, 2024 at its campus in Athens.

• Download the conference poster (.png, 7.73 MB)
• View the Call for Papers (.pdf, 223.0 KB)

Keynote speaker for this year’s conference is Dr. Marinos Pourgouris, Associate Professor of Literary Theory and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Cyprus. The conference theme, as noted in the Call for Papers published on the ILDS website, is “Dark” Durrell. While the conference organizers welcome papers on any aspect of Durrell’s writing and that of his contemporaries or milieu, they particularly encourage consideration of the theme of darkness.

Founded in 1980, the ILDS is a non-profit organization that promotes the study, understanding, and appreciation of the works of Lawrence Durrell through scholarly conferences and publications, among which a critical bibliography and the journal Deus Loci. The annual Durrell research panels, as well as the biennial international conference, attract a great number of Durrell scholars. The biennial conferences in particular remain a high point in the Society’s program of events and activities and have been held at institutions such as the Paris Nanterre University, the University of Crete, and the University of Toulouse.

Bringing the 2024 conference to Hellenic American University’s Athens campus was an idea of ILDS board member and recipient of the William Godshalk Prize for new Durrell scholarship, Dr. Athanasios Dimakis, who is also an adjunct faculty member in the University’s B.A. in English Language and Literature (BAELL) program. After sharing his idea with the director of the BAELL program, Dr. Vassiliki Kourbani, and securing her enthusiastic support, Dr. Dimakis presented his proposal at a meeting of the executive board of the Durrell Society in Louisville, Kentucky, where it was unanimously accepted.

Dr. Dimakis describes the hosting of the conference at the University’s campus as a kind of “homecoming” for this international society of scholars and academics. In his words, “the centrality of the Hellenic world in Durrell’s oeuvre and his prominence in the Anglophone literary canon on Hellenism unite the intellectual endeavors and the noble spirit of both institutions.”

Image: Part of the Conference Poster

MBA student Sri Subhakar Ganapuram has been accepted to the summer 2023 Iacocca Global Village program at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Sri joins fellow students and young professionals from around the globe in an intensive 5-week residency program of workshops, design challenges and service-learning projects that is designed to develop participants’ interdisciplinary teamwork and entrepreneurship skills. Several workshops combine classroom instruction with field outings to nearby places of historical or cultural interest.

Roughly 65-75 candidates from 35-45 countries are accepted to the Global Village program each year. In selecting candidates for admission, the Institute looks for individuals who combine academic excellence with a record of professional accomplishments and leadership experience.

Sri says of his experience: “The Iacocca Global Village Program is renowned for emphasizing experiential learning and cultural immersion. It gave me the chance to broaden my perspective on the world, improve my intercultural competence, and comprehend global challenges better.”

Before joining Hellenic American University in 2021, Sri worked for Lucent E-Commerce as a senior product development manager. Now in his final semester of his MBA program, Sri has been a highly engaged member of the student community and serves as both vice-president of the Hellenic American University Entrepreneurship Club and vice-president of the Student Body Council for the Nashua campus.

Hellenic American University’s 13th commencement was held on June 29, 2023, at the Athens Concert Hall (Dimitris Mitropoulos Hall). Friends, family, and distinguished guests joined faculty, staff, executive officers, and trustees of Hellenic American University to celebrate the 74 members of the graduating Class of 2023.

Valedictory addresses were given by Angeliki Georgaki, (M.A. in Applied Linguistics-TESOL) and Sofia Votsiou (B.S. in Psychology). The salutatorians for the Class of 2023 were Jeffrey Scott Basile (MBA), and Despoina Simitsoglou (B.S. in Psychology).

As in past commencements, the University conferred honorary degrees to individuals who have distinguished themselves through achievements in the arts or sciences, education, public service, or philanthropy. This year the University awarded two honorary doctorates: one to Eleftherios Skiadas, a journalist and historian with a long record of public service, including his current tenure as vice mayor and President of the Cultural Foundation of the City of Athens; the other to Dr. Eric Smaw, a philosopher, educator, and civil rights advocate who serves on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union. Dr. Smaw is Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy at Rollins College, where he also serves as Special Assistant to the Provost for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

In his commencement address, President Leonidas Phoebus Koskos pointed out that the new graduates were entering their professional life in a world that is rapidly being changed by the astonishing advances in artificial intelligence and new work environments. He encouraged them to draw upon the critical thinking and innovative mindset their education has equipped them with to meet the challenges in a creative and productive way and called upon them to embrace their role as global citizens and contribute to the development of their communities.

After the close of the ceremony, a reception followed where graduates celebrated this milestone with their professors, loved ones, and friends.

Congratulations to all our graduates!

Image: Hellenic American University – Graduating Class of 2023

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Christian Moraitis, a student in the B.S. in Informatics program, has won the “Best Paper Award” for the research he conducted for his capstone project and which he presented at this year’s Hellenic American University Student Research Conference on May 13, 2023. During his presentation, the undergraduate Informatics student discussed his work in developing a tool that could eventually enable deaf and hard-of-hearing persons to use their native language to communicate online with English-language speakers who do not know ASL.

In his research, Christian used machine learning and AI-enabled object detection to create a tool that would read hand gestures in real-time, predict the corresponding American Sign Language (ASL) signs, and then compile them into a sentence. The translated caption text could then be converted into speech.

Given the constraints of time and resources, he focused on having the object detection algorithm predict the letters of the American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet. The algorithm was trained on a dataset of over 3,000 photos of signed (gestured) letters that he created himself.

The conference organizer and Director of the Research Institute, Dr. Panagiotis Kalozoumis, called the project a remarkable outcome, noting that “Christian adeptly applied the knowledge acquired from the program and combined it with his exceptional creativity.” Dr. Kalozoumis, who is also Assistant Professor and Director of Informatics Programs, added that the young software engineer’s work aptly “reflects his hard work and dedication and the rigorous standards of the BSI program.”

The idea for the project came to Christian during the COVID lockdown and the boom in videoconferencing and virtual meetings collaboration that the containment measures triggered. Christian says that while the digital platforms provided a way to keep collaborating and communicating during the quarantine for many, that was less true for deaf and hard-of-hearing persons.

Even though the project was a prototype that detected and identified letters as they were being signed, the technology, given sufficient resources, could eventually be scaled to identify and predict signs as well. Still, Christian found the project very satisfying. He says that the capstone was an ideal opportunity to pursue an idea that had been on his mind since the lockdown. “I wanted to use it to do something I couldn’t otherwise do and at the same time to learn new things and to make something of value.”

This process of taking an idea from conception to implementation is one of the things that attracted him to the field in the first place. “I was always opening up my toys when I was a kid to see how they worked. And then in high school, playing video games, I would wind up thinking, how did they put this together? I think that really sparked my interest in IT and especially development.”

As a high school student, he knew what he wanted to study and where. Initially he was hoping to study in the US—his mother is from New Jersey—but that wasn’t possible financially. His next steps, he said, was to look at American university programs in Greece. “Hellenic American University seemed to be a good fit for what I wanted to do. And it has been. I’ve fully enjoyed being a student here.”

Christian graduated this June. He managed not only to finish his B.S. in Informatics in just under four years, but to do so while working a series of jobs, including a stint as factory worker and a position managing a surfing and watersport center in Rhodes and later as a software engineer for Infralabs Ltd. He’s now working in the Netherlands as a full stack developer for a firm called Pluxbox, where he creates software tools for the company’s platform.

The capstone project he did at Hellenic American University, however, left its trace in his plans for the near future. He hopes to pursue graduate studies in machine learning and computer vision.

Image: Dr. Panayotis Kalozoumis, Christian Moraitis (BSI ’23), and Dr. Themis Kaniklidou.

Hellenic American University was honored to welcome the prominent educator and civil rights advocate Dr. Smaw to the Athens campus where he led a workshop on May 22nd for administrative and teaching personnel on strategic planning for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB). Staff and faculty at the Nashua campus joined online.

During the session, Dr. Smaw, a philosophy professor at Rollins College and Special Assistant to its Provost for DEIB, explored with participants the steps of creating a DEIB plan. Using a set of interactive tasks, he guided participants through the process of building the planning team, securing the resources to implement it, and setting the metrics to evaluate its success. He stressed the importance of starting out by setting the key goals of the plan—its “North Star”, as he called it. He pointed out that these goals can be a mix of more ambitious objectives that will take time to implement and shorter-term ones that we can realize relatively fast and with limited resources. This way, he said, stakeholders can see that we’re making tangible progress from the start.

Dr. Smaw highlighted the need from the very beginning of the planning process to secure the broadest possible input from the community. For the University, this will also mean ensuring that the composition of the planning team reflects the spectrum of the institution’s stakeholders and the diversity of the student body. As the University’s Director of Institutional Research and Assessment Stephen Bacigal points out, “this was the model we have used in other major planning and evaluation projects, such as the Strategic Enrollment Plan. And it’s become more important with an increasingly international study body.”

University provost Dr. Themis Kaniklidou was pleased with the engagement that participants showed during the workshop. She noted, “I am optimistic that the DEI workshop led by Dr. Smaw will help us carry out our agenda for faculty and staff development and together to make the University a more equitable, diverse, and welcoming place. We were also reminded that taking action is important but not sufficient on its own: we need to communicate the changes we’re making and to measure our effectiveness—and, of course, change things if needed.”

The workshop was one of several outreach events that Dr. Smaw delivered during his stay in Athens (May 23 – June 2, 2023) and which included training sessions for the University’s newly formed Debating Club and a demonstration class on neurobiology and crime entitled “Zombies are real”.

Image: Dr. Smaw, Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy at Rollins College, Special Assistant to the Provost for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

The Hellenic American University Debating Team got off to a resounding start in late May with an inaugural series of workshops led by Dr. Eric Smaw, Professor of Philosophy at Rollins College and the founder and coach of its award-winning debate team. Under Dr. Smaw’s guidance, the Rollins’ team has earned first-place finishes at regional and national competitions.

The University’s own team is an initiative of provost Dr. Themis Kaniklidou, who met Dr. Smaw while she was a visiting instructor at Rollins. In her words, “Few opportunities match this one for showing how transformative a learning experience can be. We hope that the skill of debating will add value to our students’ education and foster their critical thinking and their self-confidence.”

The four-member squad, all of whom were recommended for the team by their teachers, is made up of Or Ayash (BSPSY ’26), Jonathan Cacatian (BSI ’24), Androniki Fili (BAELL ’25), and Andriana Gounalaki (BSPSY ’24). They will be coached by Dr. Kaniklidou and Stephen Bacigal, an adjunct faculty member who serves as the University’s Director of Institutional Research and Assessment.

Dr. Smaw began by providing team members with an overview of the Rollins College team, and the body of philosophical knowledge and skills they will need to acquire as debaters. But his session also included hours of hands-on training in argumentative templates, breathing exercises, and rhetoric. Joining Dr. Smaw in the training session was a contingent of three Rollins College undergraduates, champion debaters Enrique Alberti, Elle Manino, and Jiya Manhanda. The Rollins students worked individually with each member of the Hellenic American University’s team to coach them on preparing and delivering their first opening arguments.

The team will continue to meet and train this summer as it prepares for its first debate, which will take place at the Rollins campus in Florida this November. Known as the “Great Debate Forum”, this annual event is an international cultural and debating exchange that Dr. Smaw created when he saw the potential impact that his team at Rollins could have beyond the college itself.

• View our team video

Image: Hellenic American University’s Debate Team members (from left to right), Andriana Gounalaki, Androniki Fili, Or Ayash, Jonathan Cacatian.

We’re excited to be cooperating with Arcweave, the popular browser-based collaborative platform for creating and prototyping interactive narratives, in organizing this year’s 2023 Arcjam, a game design event where competing teams and individual designers create and publish a short game in 72 hours using the platform.

The game jam will take place online between May 12–15. Prizes for winning games include Arcweave Pro subscriptions and Steam gift cards.

The event is being coordinated by Giannis Georgiou, a filmmaker, screenwriter, and story consultant who teaches in Hellenic American University’s degree programs in Informatics and serves as Narrative Director of Arcweave.

Anyone can join the jam, even if they have never used Arcweave before; it is easy to learn and there are links to YouTube tutorials and documentation on the jam’s page. Nor do participants need a paid Arcweave subscription to take part in the jam.

Just as importantly, students do not need to have a background in technology. Arcweave is above all a tool for developing interactive narratives, so anyone who has a story to tell is encouraged to take part. Participants do not need to code if they don’t want to or even use images or sounds; they can instead focus on the writing. The University is thus looking forward to having a diverse representation of students from all degree programs at the event.

More info on how the game jam works and how to sign up can be found on the jam’s page.

Image: Photo by Axville on Unsplash.

Dr. Alexander Nikolaou, adjunct faculty member in the B.A. in English Language and Literature, M.A. in Applied Linguistics, and Ph. D. in Language and Communication programs, co-delivered a presentation at the annual conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics, which was held in Portland, Oregon March 18-21, 2023. The presentation, titled “Critical Reflections on Qualitative Research Methods in the Study of Affect in Heritage Language Maintenance”, was co-presented by Dr. Jennifer Sclafani, a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Ms. Rosiane Barcelos de Oliveira, a doctoral candidate at the same institution. During their talk, Dr. Nikolaou and his colleagues presented insights gained from two ethnographic research studies with heritage language (HL) speakers, one a case study of language socialization in a Brazilian trilingual family, the other interviews with successful adult HL speakers of Modern Greek.

As Dr. Nikolaou points out, the study sheds light on how second-generation migrants in English speaking countries navigate their identities, particularly those with mixed cultural and linguistic backgrounds. “Our research,” he says, “focuses on how these individuals talk about language and use it to construct their identities and affiliations, as well as to negotiate their cultural and ethnic authenticity. We believe that our study provides a unique perspective on the experiences of second-generation migrants and illuminates the complex ways in which their identity is shaped.”

Image: Dr. Alexander Nikolaou’s conference presentation at the annual conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics

The Winter 22-23 issue of Connect is now being emailed to University alumni and can be downloaded here. This issue features news about three successful events that our University hosted at its Athens campus, namely the 3rd Europe in Discourse Conference, the 1st Terra (in) Cognita International Conference: Dialogues between Greek Culture and Modern American Art and the 63rd Annual Conference of the European Branch of the American Counseling Association (EB-ACA).

President Leonidas Phoebus Koskos apprises us of developments regarding our accreditation status and the launch of a new graduate certificate program in “Drug Manufacturing and Sales”.

Our Alumni Success Story features Elena Cami (BAELL ’16), who shares her experience of the BAELL program and the way it has helped her in her career. For the Faculty Spotlight, we turn to two adjunct faculty members in the IT programs, Dr. Sokratis Sofianopoulos and Mr. Spyros Christopoulos.

Finally, as always, we share news and accomplishments of our faculty and your fellow alumni, from newly published works and talks at conferences to career advancements.

Image: CONNECT ALUMNI Winter 22-23

Hellenic American University is proud to be hosting the 2023 Olympia Summer Academy at its Athens campus on July 11-14. The 2023 Olympia Summer Academy is co-organized by the Navarino Network, a public policy initiative based in Thessaloniki, Hellenic American University, the European International Studies Association, and the Institute of International Relations.

For the last 20 years, the Olympia Summer Academy has been offering an annual series of specialized courses in politics and international studies for university students from all over the world. The program is geared to undergraduate and graduate students with an excellent command of English and an academic interest in international relations. Senior high school students and young professionals are also considered for admission.

This year's program, which will be held in Athens, features three parallel courses, with sessions taught by leading scholars from Europe and the United States:

A. Global Discord and Cooperation, with:

• Kristin Fabbe, Jakurski Family Associate Professor, Harvard Business School.
• Orfeo Fioretos, Professor of Political Science, Temple University, Philadelphia.
• Dimitris Keridis, Professor of International Politics, Panteion University; Director, Olympia Summer Academy.
• Wolfango Piccoli, co-president and Director of Research, Teneo Intelligence.

B. Terrorism and Counterterrorism, with:

• Richard English, Professor of Politics and Director of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast.
• Sofia Galani, Assistant Professor of International Law, Panteion University.
• Andreas Gofas, Professor of International Relations, Panteion University; Director, European Cultural Center of Delphi; Co-director, Olympia Summer Academy.

C. The Rise of China: Domestic and Global Perspectives, with:

• Igor Rogelja, Assistant Professor of Global Politics, University College London
• Konstantinos Tsimonis, Assistant Professor of Chinese Politics, King’s College London and Panteion University, Chinese Politics program coordinator, Institute of International Relations.

For fees and information on how to apply visit the academy’s official website.