Our crew
Marwa Elshakry
An Associate Professor, and teaches on a broad range of subjects in the history of science, technology, and medicine and modern Arabic intellectual history. Her first book, entitled, Reading Darwin in Arabic was published in 2013 with the University of Chicago Press. She is currently working on the idea of golden ages, universal histories and the history of science and orientalism from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. She received her Ph.D. (2003) from Princeton. Marwa is co-navigator of FLOATS.
Nikolas Kosmatopoulos
An Assistant Professor at the Departments of Political Studies and Public Administration & Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. His research interests include the expert politics of war and peace in the Middle East, and more recently the solidarity politics of the sea in the Mediterranean. He received his Ph.D. from Universität Zürich. Nikolas is co-navigator of FLOATS.
Georgios Kallis
An ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). He is an environmental scientist working on ecological economics and political ecology. Before coming to Barcelona, he was a Marie Curie International Fellow at the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California at Berkeley. Giorgos holds a PhD in Environmental Policy and Planning from the University of the Aegean in Greece, a Masters in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and a Masters in Environmental Engineering and a Bachelors in Chemistry from Imperial College, London.
Elisa Kim
An Assistant Professor of Art at Smith College. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in energy and environmental policy from Boston University and a Master of architecture from Washington University in St. Louis. Kim's research combines methodologies from environmental policy with architectural drawing and representation to engage a wide set of concerns about the environment, borders and boundaries. Her current oceanic mappings question the agency of the line and the illusion of the fixity of the map as an outlined artifact delineating cultural, political and social bodies from one another.
Kevin St Martin
An Associate Professor at Rutgers University. He is a human geographer whose work is at the intersection of economic geography, political ecology, and critical applications of GIScience. His research concerns the development and institutionalization of economic and environmental discourse. It emerges from a strong background in both social theory and spatial analysis, and it has been clearly and consistently linked to issues of environmental policy. While at Rutgers, he has worked on several well-funded research projects that have in common the regulation and transformation of the marine environment.
Venetia Kantsa
An Associate Professor at the University of the Aegean. She was born in Thessaloniki in 1966. She studied philosophy at the University of Ioannina (1987), social anthropology at the University of the Aegean (1995), and holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London (2001). Her research interests focus on anthropology of kinship, anthropology of gender and sexuality, queer theory, anthropology of science, and Greek ethnography. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on women’s same-sex sexuality in Greece, the visibility of same-sex desires, same-sex families, motherhood and new forms of parenthood, the summer lesbian community in Eresos and the history of the lesbian movement.
Karim Malak
A doctoral candidate at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS), at Columbia University, New York. His work centers on the history of the European colonial encounter in the Ottoman Mediterranean from the 19th to the 20th century.
Heather M. O'Brien
An Assistant Professor at the Fine Arts & Art History department at the American University of Beirut. She holds a BA in Music from Loyola University New Orleans and an MFA in Photography and Media from California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. Her work explores how capitalist desire and militaristic legacy construct our ideas about home. In working with photographs, film, installation, performance, writing and book projects, she seeks to build encounters around issues that impact American cultural imagination, from familial archives to the illusion of accurate memory.
Irmak Ertör
A political ecologist and an assistant professor in Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. As an early stage research fellow of the Marie Curie ENTITLE (European Network of Political Ecology) project, she completed her PhD in the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) with her dissertation on political ecology of marine intensive aquaculture in Europe. After obtaining her PhD, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the ENVJUSTICE project in ICTA mapping and analysing fisher folk conflicts and ocean grabbing. Her research interests include political ecology of fisheries and aquaculture, food sovereignty and small-scale fishers, and blue degrowth.
Borja Nogué Algueró
A doctoral candidate at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) working in the fields of political ecology, ecological economics and environmental history. His research centers on degrowth and the marine environment, with a focus on the Mediterranean.
Giuditta Vendrame
A designer, artist and researcher based in the Netherlands. Her work explores the intersections between design, art practice, and legal systems, focusing on citizenship, space and mobility. She looks into the spatial implications of codes and regulations, finding intentional as well as unintended opportunities across and within spatial scales, and making use of different media (film, performance, installations), often to question the opaque nature of laws and regulations and make them debatable.
Jonathan Takahashi
Is an artist based in Los Angeles and Beirut. He received his BFA in Photography from CalState Long Beach and MFA in Photography and Media from CalArts. His work explores community dialogue through activist and grassroots projects. His work grapples with how the site of place and community directly define ethnic identity. It is within this site of locality that the personal and political are inextricably linked. He has exhibited his work in galleries, book fairs, and alternative art spaces.
Maria Hadjimichael
Is a Research Fellow at the University of Cyprus working on the fields of political ecology, environmental politics and governance of the Commons with her main focus being the sea and the coastline. How is the understanding of the sea and the coastal line as a ‘Common’ or ‘Common Heritage’ being affected by international agreements or national law, or even how is this being instrumentalised to expand the authority of the State? She is the Vice-chair of the COST Action “OceanGov: Ocean Governance for Sustainability – challenges, options and the role of science”. At the same time, Maria studies the theories of the Commons through her experiences as an activist in environmental as well as social issues particularly in Cyprus.