Eugene Michail

I work on contemporary European histories of conflict, refugeedom, political radicalism, cross-cultural contacts, and memory. I focus on Balkan and Greek history from the start of the 20^th century to today.

At the University of Brighton I am co-leader for the BA degree in Critical History, while I also teach for the Globalisation: History, Politics, Culture BA, the War and Conflict BA, and for the MA in War: History and Politics. I supervise PhD researchers on a range of topics, mainly through our TECHNE scholarship programme.

After finishing my BA in History and Archaeology at the University of Athens, I went on to do an MA and a PhD in Contemporary History at Sussex University, with a grant from the Greek Foundation of State Scholarships (IKY). I joined the teaching team of the Humanities Progrmame at the University of Brighton in 2014, having previously held posts at the University of Sussex and at Canada’s Queen’s University.

My scholar interests tend to move along with the political developments of my time. In the late 1990s I focused on the history of inter-European relations. My MA dissertation was on the British perceptions of Germany after 1945 and after 1989. My PhD was on the history of British representations of the Balkans in the first half of the 20^th century. Building on Edward Said's and Maria Todorova’s theories, I explored the many channels through which the British public and politicians built their images of the Balkans. My current research on the western European reactions to the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s is a continuation of this strand of work.

The post-2008 Greek crisis made apparent how powerful the narratives of the 1940s still are in Greek society. In reaction to this, my new research project tries to uncover what exactly the Greek people thought and dreamt during the Second World War about the postwar. What sort of new politics did they envisage? My findings show a widely radicalised population in the early years of the Occupation, but they also reveal major splits and mutations of the early idealism during 1943. My first article on this topic is due soon.

The Refugee 'Crisis’ of 2015 found me at the Greek islands. I am working now with local activists on the island of Chios, setting up a local collaborative history project on the refugee crisis, preparing an archive and collecting memories of recent events.

At the University of Brighton I am a member of MARS, the Migrant And Refugee Solidarity network of workers and students, and of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories.

INDICATIVE WRITINGS IN NON-ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS

with Dimitris Dalakoglou, Fortress Europe as infrastructure, Open Democracy (27 February 2020)

Περιοδολόγηση της ιστορίας του προσφυγικού στη Χίο [Periodisation of the refugee crisis in Chios], Απλωταριά (26 Sep 2018)

Πρέπει να Γράψουμε την Ιστορία του Προσφυγικού [We must write the history of the refugee crisis], Απλωταριά (15 Jul 2018)

Greece: The History of a Crisis (2013-5) - Author and administrator for a blog that offered a historical perspective on the Greek Crisis

‘Greece: seeds of hope in the despair of austerity’, Anticapitalist Initiative (12 February 2013)

RECENT PRESENTATIONS AND CONFERENCE PAPERS

‘Living with Refugees: Historical reflections on local community responses to the recent ‘refugee crisis’’, for Negotiating Displacement: New Perspectives and Connections in War, Migration and Refugee Studies, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies – Amsterdam (8-9 December 2019)

‘The radical political imaginary of the Greek resistance during the Second World War’, for Resistance movements during World War II under Comparative Perspectives, History Department of East China Normal University – Shanghai (24-27 October 2019)

‘Solidarity and Opposition: Local Communities and Activism during the 'Refugee Crisis'’, for Department of History and Philosophy of Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (14 May 2019)

‘Between Solidarity and Opposition: Responses to the Refugees in an Aegean Host Community’, for Unsettled Europe: Refugees, states and politics in Southeastern Europe, University of Graz - Center for Southeast European Studies (27-29 January 2017)

‘Visions of Liberation: Greece 1941-1944’, for Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism, Raphael Samuel History Centre - Queen Mary University of London (1-3 July 2016)

‘“Welcome to Greece, F**k the Police”: The Syrian Refugee “Crisis” and the Breaching of the Aegean Border’, for Association for the Study of Nationalities conference, Columbia University – United States (14-16 April 2016)

'“Belsen 92”: the historiographical link between the Holocaust and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s', for British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Annual Conference, Cambridge University (28-30 March 2015)

‘Who won the war? The politics of remembering in Greece, from the 1940s to today’, for Occupation/Liberation: Cultural Representations of 1944-45 - The Annual Conference of the Group for War and Culture Studies, University of Bristol (10-12 September 2014)

‘The Shifting Memory of the Balkan Wars in Western Historiography, 1912-1999’, for The Balkan Wars 1912/13. Experience, Perception, Remembrance, Istanbul Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies & Regensburg Institute for the Study of Eastern and Southeastern Europe (IOS), Istanbul-Turkey (11-13 October 2012)

National Identities (2018) - review of Rodanthi Tzanelli, ‘Nation-building and identity in Europe: The dialogics of reciprocity’ (2008)

Social History, 42/4 (2017), 573-4 – review of Dimitris Dalakoglou, ‘The Road: an ethnography of (im)mobility, space, and cross-border infrastructures in the Balkans’ (2017)

Labour History Review, 81/2 (2016), 175-7 – review of Nikolaos Papadogiannis, ‘Militant Around the Clock? Left-Wing Youth Politics, Leisure, and Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship Greece, 1974–1981’ (2015)

Slavonic & East European Review, 92/3 (2014), 564-5 – review of Mark Biondich, ‘The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878. Zones of Violence’ (2011)