Vassilis Nitsiakos
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Director of the Konitsa Summer School
Vassilis Nitsiakos studied Modern Greek (University of Ioannina), Folk life Studies (University of Leeds, England) and Social Anthropology (University of Cambridge, England). He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. He is currently Professor at the University of Ioannina, Department of History and Archaeology. His main research interest are: Economic, social and cultural transformations in modern Greece, the cultural construction of space and time, myth and ritual, tradition and modernity, ethnicity and nationalism, emigration, cultural ecology, theory and method in social sciences and the humanities. His most recent research projects are in the fields of migration, borders and identities and cultural ecology. Currently he has been engaged in the THALIS research project Conservation through religion. The sacred forests of Epirus. His books On the border. Transborder mobility, ethnic groups and boundaries on the Albanian-Greek frontier, LIT, 2010, and Peklari. Social Economy in a Greek Village, LIT, 2016 are included in the publication series of the Border Crossings Network.

Ioannis Manos
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Ioannis Manos is assistant Professor in the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki. He studied History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Social Anthropology at the Universities of Hamburg, Germany and Sussex in UK. He has worked as a Full Time Visiting Research Fellow at the Sussex European Institute, (Sussex University). His publications and main research interests focus on Southeast Europe and include the geopolitical borders and border regions, nationalism and identity politics, anthropology of dance, methodology of teaching anthropology and epistemology and methodology of research.

Paraskevas Potiropoulos
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Paraskevas Potiropoulos is assistant Researcher at the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre of the Academy of Athens. He studied Philosophy and Psychology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Social Anthropology and Folklore at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and at the University of Ioannina, Greece. His research interests and publications has been focused in the identity politics, the symbolic construction of place and the transformation of space, the refugees and border regions. His academic interests include material culture, local identity, the methodology and epistemology of ethnographic research.

Monica Stroe
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Monica Stroe works as assistant professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration Bucharest (SNSPA), where she teaches Anthropology of food, Heritage politics, Sociology of consumption, Ethnographic writing and coordinates the ethnographic research projects of the MA students. She studied Nationalism Studies at Central European University in Budapest and Anthropology at SNSPA Bucharest, with various fellowships or short study grants at Goldsmiths College, University of Perugia, Universite Libre Bruxelles. Her research interests and publications focus on cultural landscapes, semi-subsistence farming, food heritage, food and social class, identity politics.

Zeliha Nilüfer Nahya
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Zeliha Nilüfer Nahya is associate Professor in the Department of Turkish Folklore at Erciyes University in Kayseri, Turkey. She studied Folklore and Ethnology at Ankara University. She also worked as assistant Professor for one year in the Department of Anthropology at Yeni Yüzyıl University in Istanbul. Her research interests and publications focus on religious conversion and identity in Christians of Turkey, image and Otherness, food culture, converted sacred places, kitchen as a cultural place. She conducted many fieldworks in Turkey.

Kalliopi Stara
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Kalliopi Stara is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Biological Applications and Technologies Department of the University of Ioannina where she also teaches Cultural Ecology (2016-2017). Her research is focused on the study of Sacred Natural Areas, especially in Konitsa and Zagori, Ethno-botany, Ethno-ornithology and Environmental education. She holds a degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Psychology (1992), a master's degree from the University of Wales, Bangor in Ecology (2001) and a PhD from the University of Ioannina in Folk Studies (2009). Her PhD thesis is about the sacred woods and groves in the Vikos-Aoos National Park, while her research interests are focused on the scientific fields of Cultural Ecology and Ethno -ecology.

Rigas Tsiakiris
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Rigas Tsiakiris is currently working in the Forestry Service of Ioannina (Department of Forest Management) and until recently was working as a consultant of the Deputy Minister of Environment and Energy. He has also worked for the Hellenic Forest Research Institute and already from the 1980s he was engaged in several research teams surveying the biodiversity of mountains and islands all over Greece. With postgraduate studies in Great Britain in the field of Ecology, he finished his PhD in the Department of Biology (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) with a thesis on the sustainable management of protected areas through agricultural production. Currently his research interest focuses on the historical ecological human-nature relationship in the Mediterranean and how this is reflected on the landscapes of Epirus.

Besim Can Zırh
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Besim Can Zırh is Assistant Professor working at the Sociology Department, Middle East Technical University (Ankara), where he also graduated first in sociology (BA) in 2002 and then in political sciences (MSc) in 2015. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University College London in 2012. His dissertation focused on the migration experiences of Alevis and their transnational networks in the case of funerary practices. He conducted a two-year multi-sited ethnographic field research including Alevi organizations in Berlin, Cologne, London and Oslo. His research interests include diaspora politics and home-town associations. He is a member of the board for the Sociology Association of Turkey and the Association for Migration Studies.

Rajko Muršič
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is professor of ethnology/cultural anthropology at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Dept. of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology. His research focuses on anthropology of popular music, theories of culture, epistemology, urban anthropology, methodology of anthropological research, etc. He participates as expert researcher in the ERC project Sensotra (Sensory Transformations and Transgenerational Environmental Relationships in Europe, 1950-2020) at the University of Eastern Finland (2016-2021).

Selected publications:
Muršič, Rajko, 2017, Glasbeni pojmovnik za mlade [Music Glossary for the Youth.] Maribor: Aristej.
Muršič, Rajko and Miha Kozorog, eds., 2017, Sounds of Attraction: Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Popular Music. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba.

Panayotis Panopoulos
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was born in Athens in 1967. He received his University Degree in Education from the University of Athens (1989). Both his Post-graduate Degree and his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology were received from the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of the Aegean, Mytilene, in 1991 and 1998 respectively. He has taught anthropology at the Democretian University of Thrace, the University of Crete and Panteion University, Athens. He is currently Assistant Professor of Music and Dance at the Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean. His research interests concern the anthropology of sound and performance (e.g. Skyros Carnival. Photographs by Dick Blau, Essay by Agapi Amanatidis and Panayotis Panopoulos, CD + DVD by Steven Feld. Santa Fe, New Mexico: VOXLOX, 2011). His ethnographic publications concern the symbolism of sound and hearing in modern Greece (e.g. “Animal Bells as Symbols: Sound and Hearing in a Greek Island Village”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9: 639-56, 2003); another part of his research concerns the study of local associations and the role of musical performaces in the construction of place (e.g. “Retour au village natal: Associations locales et renouveau culturel”. Ethnologie Francaise XXXV, 2: 243-53, 2005). In 2015, the English translation of his essay: “Homeland as Sound and Sound as Homeland: Cultural and Personal Soundscapes in Christos Christovasilis’ Short Stories” (originally written and published in Greek) was chosen to inaugurate the new Ethnomusicology Translations e-journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is currently conducting research on the culture of the Deaf community in Greece and collaborating in projects with visual artists (e.g. Φωνές/ Fonés, a collective volume edited by Panayotis Panopoulos and Elpida Rikou on a collaborative project of visual artists and social scientists exploring voice; “Voice-o-graph”, a project of arts-based ethnography with visual artist Panos Charalambous, presented at documenta 14, Athens/ Kassel in June and July 2017). He has been a Research Visiting Scholar at Princeton University (2002-3, 2012) and the University of California, Berkeley (2009). He has also taught as invited lecturer at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (2012) and at the University of Cologne (2018). He is a member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and the Greek Society for Acoustic Ecology.

Falia Varelaki
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Falia Varelaki is a PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology in the Department of Social Anthropology and History at the University of the Aegean and a member of the Lab of Family and Kinship Studies of the University of the Aegean. She holds a master’s degree in Social and Historical Anthropology from the University of the Aegean and a bachelor’s degree from the Democritus University of Thrace. Her research interests and publications include medical anthropology, biopolitics, kinship, gender, body, memory, social space and place, and identity politics.

Faidon Moudopoulos Athanasiou
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is a PhD student in Archaeology, at the University of Sheffield. He holds a MA in Aegean Archaeology (University of Sheffield) and a MA in Heritage Management (University of Kent & AUEB). His research focuses on the mountains of Zagori, NW Greece and he combines archaeological, anthropological and historical approaches to understand the complex development of the area during the centuries of the Ottoman period. His publications include the following:
•2019: “Τοπικά αφηγήματα, τοπική ιστορία και αρχαιολογία: σκέψεις με αφορμή το βιβλίο οι ρίζες των Σουδενιωτών”. Ηπειρωτικό Ημερολόγιο, ΛΖ'. 235-250,
•2016: Ιστορίες Κρίσης, Αθήνα: Οσελότος.
•2015: “From past to present: Heritage and conflict; modern promenades in the Acropolis”. Personas y comunidades: Actas del Segundo Congreso Internacional de Buenas Prácticas en Patrimonio Mundial. Madrid: Universidad Complutense. 107-123.