Dr Kostis Kornetis
M.A. (London), PhD (EUI)
Department of History
Honorary Research Associate
- Profile
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I studied history in Munich, London and Florence. I taught European history at Brown University and New York University, and was Conex-Marie Curie Experienced Fellow at the Universidad Carlos III, Madrid, and Santander Fellow in Iberian Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. I was a Teaching Associate in Modern History in the Department of History at the University of Sheffield in 2019-20.
My teaching and research interests are rooted in 20th century comparative European history, specialising in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. My research covers the history of social movements, memories of genocide and dictatorships, and the ways in which these relate to current politics.I have published extensively on the history and memory of social movements in the European South and am currently working on a manuscript on the generational memory of the transitions to democracy in Spain, Portugal and Greece.
I have received grants from Carlsberg Foundation, the European Commission, the Latsis Foundation, NYU Global Research Initiatives, and others.
- Research interests
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My first book, Children of the Dictatorship (Berghahn Books 2013) placed the student resistance to Greek Colonels’ dictatorship (1967-74) within the larger context of world-wide student political action during the “long 1960s”.
Based on an interplay between political and social, macro and micro, local and global, the book elucidates the circulation of radical ideas and cultural transfers that shaped Greek, and to some extent Southern European youth cultures, radical politics and socialisation.
In recognition of its innovative use of microhistory and transnational scholarship Children of the Dictatorship received the Edmund Keeley Book Award of the Modern Greek Studies Association in the US (2015).This research further produced a number of publications in high-ranking journals such as European Review of History (2015), Journal of Contemporary History (2015), and Journal of Modern Greek Studies (2017).
An article on the public history of torture in Greece has been published in the journal Ricerche Storiche (2014).
In 2015, I was awarded a Conex-Marie Skłodowska Curie Experienced Fellowship, based at the Universidad Carlos III, Madrid.
The fellowship funded my research project, titled ‘Remembering Democratisation in Southern Europe’, on the collective memory of the democratic transitions in Spain, Portugal and Greece since the 1970s.
This research forms the core of my latest book manuscript, The Three Generations of Transition: Remembering Democratisation in Southern Europe, which I completed during my tenure as Santander Fellow in Iberian Studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford (2018-19).Its original findings draw on extensive fieldwork on individual and collective biographies and direct or aggregate memories to address the central questions of how post-authoritarian societies remember the radical past, and how the latter shapes the political space of the present.
The manuscript is currently under review with OUP’s Academic History Series.
Outputs from this research have already been included in two volumes he has co-edited: Consumption and Gender in Southern Europe since the ‘Long 1960s’ (Bloomsbury Academic 2016) and Rethinking Democratisation in Spain, Greece and Portugal (Palgrave, St Antony’s Series, 2019).
- Teaching activities
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Teaching activities 2019-20:
Undergraduate:
- HST117: The Making of the Twentieth Century
- HST202: Historians and History
- HST287: From World War to Cold War: Europe 1945-1968
- HST3144/5: Ending the Cold War
Postgraduate:
- HST6062: Cold War Histories
- HST6801: Research Skills for Historians
- Professional activities and memberships
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I have collaborated in the exhibition and catalogue of “Restless Youth: Growing in Europe, 1945 to Now” of the House of European History, Brussels.
I also collaborated with Documenta 14 in Athens, 2016.
I have also conducted the research and/or co-written the script for various historical documentaries, including Mataroa. The journey continues (2019) and Mussolini’s Dirty War (2008).