Nicholas Doumanis is Hellenic Foundation and Illinois Chair of Hellenic Studies and Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago. He has authored several books, including Myth and Memory in the Mediterranean (Macmillan, 1997), which deals with Greek Dodecanesian experiences of Italian rule (1912-1947). The book won the Fraenkel Prize and was translated into Italian as Una Faccia, Una Razza (Il Mulino, 2003). He has also written Italy (Inventing the Nation) (Arnold/Bloomsbury, 2001), A History of Greece, 2nd ed. (Bloomsbury), Before the Nation (Oxford UP, 2013). He also edited The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914-1945 (Oxford UP, 2016) and co-authored The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, the 20th and 21st Centuries (Edinburgh UP, 2023) with Antonis Liakos. He is currently working on a longue durée history of the eastern Mediterranean and a global history of the modern Greek diaspora.

“There is no Greek word for ‘patronizing’. Yet this is what I incurred as a young scholar in 1990 when I sat in the office of a Dodecanesian lawyer, who had just written the history of his island. It was a very large book that detailed the deeds of great men and the patriotic struggles of his island compatriots. I tried to explain my project was about how people experienced Italian rule, and that I was generating my information by conducting oral histories. He yelled – yelling was his natural mode of communication – that I was not doing history. He asserted that I was confused, badly trained, and that I should either reconsider my project or go home. A few weeks later, he concluded that what I was doing was sociology, but while he was kind enough to lend me useful materials, he continued to behave like the god-professor authority, which he was not. That experience encouraged me to think about class, about social inequality, and how local elites treated humble folk. I thought more about how that treatment might have influenced relations with the Italians, and how sometimes the national adversary was not necessarily the primary adversary.”

Nicholas Doumanis