Visiting Faculty Summer 2024
We are excited to have several distinguished guests joining us in Thasos this summer.
Panayotis (Paddy) League
Panayotis (Paddy) League is an author, composer, performer, and musicologist specializing in the traditional music, dance, and oral poetry of the Greek Aegean, Northeast Brazil, and the American South. Paddy serves as Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas at Florida State University, where he teaches graduate seminars on creative ethnographic writing, cross-cultural music/language interfaces, musicological theory and method, and a variety of topical courses, as well as directing FSU’s Brazilian music ensemble, Grupo Jaraguá. He publishes widely in European, Brazilian, and North American journals and edited volumes, and his monograph Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-Sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora – an exploration of late Ottoman intercommunality in the music and dance practices of post-1922 Greek refugees and their descendants – was recently published by University of Michigan Press. Paddy performs and records Greek, Brazilian, Irish, and his own original music widely across Europe and the Americas, and his instrumental retro surf rock project, Echolocator, will be releasing its first album in late 2022. He was recently named a Master Artist by both the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Florida Folklife Program for his work teaching and performing the traditional music and oral poetry of the island of Kalymnos.
Amanda Michalopoulou
Amanda Michalopoulou is a Greek author. She has published eight novels, three short story collections and a novella. Her stories have appeared in Harvard Review, Guernica, PEN magazine, World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, The Guardian, Brooklyn Rail among others. She is a winner of the Revmata Award (1994), the Diavazo Award for her novel Jantes (1996) and the Academy of Athens Prize for her short story collection “Bright Day” (2013). The American translation of her book I’d Like won the International Literature Prize by NEA in the US (2008) and the Liberis Liber Prize of the Independent Catalan Publishers (2012). Her stories and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages. Both her novels Why I killed my best friend and God’s Wife were short-listed for the ALTA National Translation Award in the US (in 2014 and 2020 respectively). Her short story Mesopotamia was selected for Best European Fiction 2018 (Dalkey Archive). Her theatre piece Phaedra on Fire was performed at the Little Theatre of Ancient Epidaurus (2021). She had various literary grants from the DAAD and LCB in Berlin, the Shanghai Writers Association, Edward Albee Foundation, Ledig-Rowohlt, Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation etc. She was a fellow at the Iowa International Writers Program. She lives in Athens, Greece where she teaches creative writing. http://amandamichalopoulou.com
Allison Wilkins
Allison Wilkins is the assistant director for Writing Workshops in Greece. She is the author of Girl Who. Her poems and essays have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Superstition Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly and others. Allison is also a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT 200) through the Yoga & Ayurveda Center. She believes in the value of yoga to unite mind, body and breath, to aid in stress relief, to unlock creativity, and to help all bodies move. She teaches Vinyasa Flow style classes, Chair Yoga, Kids Yoga, and Gentle Flow with a focus on alignment and modifications for every body.
