Dimitris Antoniou (D.Phil., University of Oxford, 2011) studied theology at the University of Athens, anthropology at Princeton, and oriental studies at Oxford. Before joining the Program in Hellenic Studies, he was Faculty Research Fellow at Oxford, Hannah Seeger Davis Fellow at Princeton, and National Bank of Greece Fellow at LSE.
His research draws on anthropological and historical approaches to examine state operation and the making of public history in Greece. In particular, Dimitris studies unrealized government initiatives and failed architectural projects. His monograph, The Mosque That Wasn’t There: Islam and the Politics of Imagination in Contemporary Greece (forthcoming, University of Pennsylvania Press), explores the state’s failure to construct a mosque. Recent articles examine spatial absence and encounters with the unthinkable in the scholarly investigations of Greece’s dictatorial past. Dimitris is curator of the Columbia University Libraries special collection Greek Underground Press.
His monograph, Why not Build the Mosque? Islam, Political Cost, and the Practice of Democracy in Greece (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), explores the state’s failure to construct a mosque, while his new ethnography about the Church of the Savior in Athens examines spatial absence and encounters with the unthinkable in Greece’s dictatorial past. Dimitris is also curator of the Columbia University Libraries special collection of Greek zines and underground press.
External Links
Research Interests
Publications
Why not Build the Mosque: Islam, Political Cost, and the Practice of Democracy in Greece. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025
“The Mosque and the Church: Structures, Counter-Structures, and the Topology of Identity.” (pp. 451-480)
“Crisis, History, Complicity.”
"Making the Junta Fascist: Antidictatorial Struggle, the Colonels, and the Statues of Ioannis Metaxas" (pp. 451-480)
