Paschalis Kitromilides

He is a board member of the Hellenic Parliament Academic Council (2004–present) and director of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies (1980–present, as successor of Melpo Merlier [el]), past director of the Centre for Modern Greek Studies at the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens (2000-2011) and past president of the Cyprus Research Centre (2006-2009), the European Society for the History of Political Thought (2009-2011) and the Hellenic Political Science Association (1988-1992). He regularly writes in the Greek weekly newspaper To Vima.

Kitromilides has also written on Cypriot history and political affairs, his native land’s political and historical complexity serving as the basis for many of his academic publications. In 2002 he issued a prosopography of Cypriot intellectuals and in 2008 he launched a major research and editorial project on sources of Cypriot learning (1571-1878) published by the National Hellenic Research Foundation.

Prior to assuming his position at the University of Athens (1983), Prof. Kitromilides taught at Harvard University (1978-1979). He has also taught at Brandeis University (1987), and has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge (1989-1990, as Visiting Fellow and Life Member of Clare Hall), the University of Oxford (1993,1997), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1990, 2001), the European University Institute in Florence (2010) and the Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies Villa I Tatti, Florence (2012).

Since his doctoral dissertation (Harvard University, 1979) Kitromilides has devoted his research to the study of Modern Greek Enlightenment, an academic field that was initially developed by Konstantinos Dimaras [el; de]. While Dimaras was a pioneer in singling out the phenomenon and its main representatives, as well as in referring to their literary dimensions, Kitromilides turned his analysis to political ideas and the context of historical vicissitudes, social dynamics and western Enlightenment influences which could lead a traditional Balkan, Ottoman-dominated society to modernity and change (see in Publications below, Enlightenment and Revolution, “Imagined Communities”, Enlightenment, Nationalism, Orthodoxy).

He earned his BA in political science and modern European history from Wesleyan University (B.A. with Highest Honours in Government, 1972). He holds an MA (1975) and a PhD in political science from Harvard University where he studied under Michael Walzer and Judith Shklar, two distinguished American scholars of their time. He completed his degree in 1979 with his dissertation bearing the title, “Tradition, Enlightenment and Revolution: Ideological Change in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Greece.”

Paschalis M. Kitromilides (born 5 November 1949) in Nicosia, Cyprus, is a Greek-Cypriot political scientist and intellectual historian. His expertise is on the history of political thought. His special field of research is the Enlightenment in South-eastern Europe, focusing on the central role of its Neohellenic component. He is a professor of political science at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens since 1983. He was elected full member of the Academy of Athens on 6 February 2020.

Prof. Kitromilides was born on 5 November 1949 in Nicosia, then in British Cyprus, the first son of philologists Michael and Magda Kitromilides. After secondary studies at the Pancyprian Gymnasium and military service in the Cypriot National Guard in 1968-69, he earned a Fulbright scholarship allowing him to study in the United States.