Q: What do you like most about your work?
Doing research – including on Greece – is the thing that brought me into academia and the thing I enjoy most. At the HO – and at the LSE more generally – this combines with the opportunity to interact with policy-makers and to have an impact on policy and real-life outcomes.
Q: What is your favourite place on campus?
Once upon a time it used to be my smoking spot at the west side of the 4th floor canteen in the Old Building – I must have written more than half of my PhD Thesis there. Nowadays, it is my smoking spot outside of LSE’s Centre Building – or at the Café Nero across the campus on Kingsway.
Q: What advice would you pass on to aspiring academics?
Doing academic research is an agonising vocation – and a not-very-well-rewarded one. But if the passion and curiosity are there, it is also the most rewarding of all vocations!
Q: Who inspires you the most?
I am from the “kill your idols” generation, but in my professional life I have been influenced and inspired the most by Ian Gordon, my post-doc mentor from LSE’s Geography Department (Ian, don’t worry, I am non-violent!).
Q: If you could have dinner with a famous Greek person, dead or alive, who would it be and why?
I would like to have a glass of retsina with Nikolas Asimos and breakfast at the agora with Diogenes the Cynic. A lot to discuss, a lot to learn, a lot of conventional wisdoms to challenge – but in particular I would love to have a discussion with either of them about Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus) and Freud (Civilisation and its Discontents).
Q: Can you share something surprising about yourself?
I have written more songs than academic papers – although I have published more of the latter than I have recorded of the former… (Not sure how surprising this is…)
Q: What are you currently reading?
The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant, and The Masquerade of Istanbul, by Mehmet Agop.