Faculty

Professor Cosmopoulos specializes in Greek Culture, with particular emphasis on archaeology and history.  He has studied Archaeology, History, and Classical Languages at the University of Athens (B.A., summa cum laude, 1981), the University of Sorbonne-Paris IV (D.E.U.G., 1983), and Washington University in St. Louis (M.A. 1986, Ph.D. 1989). He also holds a Diploma in Underwater Archaeology from the Council of Europe (1984).

His  research interests are the social, political, and cultural history of Greece, about which he has published sixteen books and more than one hundred articles and scholarly papers in international journals. He has excavated at several ancient sites in Greece and Ukraine, including Eleusis, Mycenae, Pylos, Epidauros, Ancient Corinth, Ithaca, Oropos, Olbia.

Currently, he directs the excavations at Iklaina, in the region of Pylos.  The Iklaina site has been included in the top ten archaeological discoveries in Greece and has been covered extensively by the national and international press.  Cosmopoulos is a featured Explorer of the National Geographic Society and for his research has been awarded the Canada Rh Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship and Research in the Humanities and the Trustees Award from the Academy of Science (St. Louis).

At UMSL, Professor Cosmopoulos teaches courses on ancient, Byzantine, and Modern Greek history and culture.   His teaching extends beyond the classroom and into the field, where he has trained over one thousand undergraduate and tens of graduate students. In recognition of his teaching, the University of Manitoba has awarded him a Merit Award for Teaching (1991) and the prestigious Olive Beatrice Stanton Award for Excellence in Teaching (1999). In 2001 he was nominated for the national “Canadian Professor of the Year Award” and in 2003 he was awarded the Archaeological Institute of America Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Dr. Cosmopoulos serves or has served as an Academic Trustee of the Archaeological Institute of America; Chairman of the Gennadeion Library Committee and member of the Managing Committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens; and a life member of the Archaeological Society of Athens. At the University of Manitoba he served as Vice-Provost of University College and founding Director of the Centre for Hellenic Civilization. Also he has served as President of the Winnipeg Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and of the Classical Association of Manitoba, and Vice-President of the Archaeological Institute of Canada.

Dr. Cosmopoulos has worked intensely for the promotion of Greek Studies in North America. In 1993, in close cooperation with the Consulate General of Greece in Toronto and the Pan-Macedonian Association of Ontario he founded the Pan-Macedonian Association of Manitoba, of which he served as first president. In 1995 he founded the Centre for Hellenic Civilization of the University of Manitoba, the only university center in Canada, dedicated to the study of ancient, medieval, and modern Greece. In 1998, he established the Canadian Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles.  At UMSL, he established the “Nicholas and Theodora Matsakis Greek Culture Center”, instituted a Certificate in Greek Studies, established two Study-in-Greece programs, the Archives of the St. Louis Greek community including the Oral History Project, and a variety of other activities aiming at preserving and promoting Hellenic Studies and the local Greek Community.  

Professor Cosmopoulos is a Fellow of the Academy of Science, St. Louis; a member of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences; a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; a Corresponding Member of the Greek Academy of Arts and Sciences; and a National Geographic Society Explorer. 

Vicky Hioureas has studied English Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (BA), Late Antique and Byzantine History at King’s College London (MA), Classics at the University of California, Irvine (MA), and is currently completing her Ph.D. in Byzantine History at Princeton University.

Her research interests are the social, political, and cultural history of the middle and late Byzantine periods. She is particularly interested in the social dimensions of violence during these periods and how violence relates to memory, authority, and hierarchy.

She has taught courses on Classical mythology and literature and Byzantine palaeography.  At UMSL she will be teaching courses on Byzantine Culture and History.

Fields of Interest:

• Urban History, Environmental History, 20th Century United States, Public History

Major Publications:

• Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)

• Common Fields: An Environmental History of St. Louis (St. Louis, MO Historical Society Press, 1997), editor

• Chasing the American Dream: A History of Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks (New York, Basic Books, 2001)

• Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner-Cities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010)

Current Research:

• Memorializing Urban Displacement; Climate change and urbanization

Jon McGinnis is a Greco-Arabist who also has interest in medieval Latin science, philosophy and theology. He received a Master's in Church History from the University of North Texas (1991) and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania (2000), where he worked jointly in the philosophy department and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

As a graduate student he was a research fellow at Harvard University for a year in the department of the History of Science. He also was a Fulbright scholar to Egypt, where he studied at both the American University in Cairo and the University of Cairo.

Since becoming a professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis he has received a University of Missouri Research Board Award as well as National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Research Stipend, two NEH Fellowships and has been elected to Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is also on the executive council of the Society for Medieval and Patristic Philosophy. In addition to being the philosophy department's resident classicist and medievalist, he is also a fellow in the Center for International Studies.

His dissertation, Time and Time Again: A Study of Aristotle and Ibn Sînâ's Temporal Theoriesexamines Aristotle's and the Muslim Aristotelian Avicenna's conceptions of time. In addition to his interest in ancient and medieval temporal theory, he has also recently completed translating Avicenna's treatise on kinematics, or the theory of motion and what is required for motion, and is beginning work on a book to be titled Avicennan Kinematics: Its Sources, Content and Influence, which in fact will be the first survey of medieval, Arabic kinematics. He also has done work on medieval Islamic conceptions of science and modal theories as well.

He has published articles in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Medieval Philosophy and Theology, The Journal for Patristic, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, The Journal of the History of Philosophy, KronoScope, The Modern Schoolman, Apeiron and Arabic Sciences and Philosophy. He also has several articles appearing as chapters in books dedicated to Islamic philosophy and science. He is both a contributor to and editor of a collection of articles on Avicenna, titled Interpreting Avicenna: Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2004). In collaboration with David C. Reisman he is bringing out the first anthology of classical Arabic philosophy to be published by Hackett Press in 2005.

He has been interviewed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch concerning recent scandals in the Catholic Church and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about the scientific heritage of Islam. He has also given public lectures on Islam and the legal status of woman and children within Islam at the request of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

All in all, Jon thinks that life is pretty good, but better with a cup of coffee.

Dr. Michailidis is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in political anthropology. He received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University in 2016 and has also studied Political Science and International Relations at Panteion University, Athens (B.A) and at Bosphorous University in Istanbul (M.A).

Before coming to UMSL, Dr. Michailidis taught at Rutgers and Princeton. He is currently teaching courses on the Anthropology and Culture of Modern Greece and the Balkans, and on Democracy and Globalism. 

His broader research interests are arts and politics, ethnicity, Hellenic cultural heritage in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, social memory, material culture, humans and technology, political theory, social movements, cultural diplomacy and soft power, European studies, Greece, U.S.A, Turkey. He is currently working on a book monograph about music and ethnic identities in northeastern Turkey, to be published by Indiana University Press. The book analyzes the revival of Pontian-Greek music in contemporary Turkey, its ethnic and sociopolitical repercussions. He has presented papers in various academic conferences. 

He has two forthcoming articles in edited volumes in Greece: “Searching for Roots: Memory and the Remaking of Self in northeastern Turkey” in Tsimpiridou, Foteini (ed), Kathimas Anatole. Kritiki Publications (Fall 2019), and “Turkish, Black Sea or Pontian Music? The Meaning of Trebizond Music and Cultural Belonging in Thessaloniki”, in Theodosiou and Kallimopoulou (eds) Music in Greece. Pedio Publications (Spring 2020).

Interests

Elementary ancient Greek and Latin, links between crime and justice issues then and now, death penalty and its manifestations

Education

Dr. Margaret Phillips  received her Ph.D. from St. Louis University’s Department of Classical Languages, with a major in Greek and a double minor in Latin and linguistics.  She began teaching Latin in 1992 in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. In 1993, she also began teaching in the Criminology department, courses related to her outside interests in criminal justice-related areas.  In 2005 she became a full-time instructor in the Department of Foreign Language and Literatures and currently holds the rank of Associate Teaching Professor.

Teaching interests

Dr. Phillips has taught courses in elementary Latin and elementary Greek. For the Greek Studies program, she teaches several courses, including an online survey course of ancient Greek civilization and culture.  From 1993 to 2005, she taught courses in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, at first writing courses and then courses related to her outside interests in advocacy within the criminal justice system and specifically the death penalty. She developed a series of computer drills to accompany an elementary Latin textbook which has been used internationally. Margaret has also taught courses within the Honors College.

Originally from Corinth, Greece, Nikos Poulopoulos was educated in Classics and Archaeology at the University of California at Berkeley, and in Modern Greek Studies and Philology at Harvard University.  His interests lie in the history of ideas and the cultural history and poetics of Greece in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly narratives of crypto-colonialism, bio-mythologies and reception studies.  He recently edited a volume on the literature of the Greek Civil War for the journal Hellenic Studies. He is currently working on two separate projects: American Dystopia in Greek Modernity, and Graeculiand Roman Studies in nineteenth century Greece.

Dean and Professor Emeritus Constantine E. Michaelides (Washington University in St. Louis), is an architect who has practiced in Greece and the United States. Born in Athens, he received an architecture diploma from the  National Technical University in 1952 and earned an M.Arch. from Harvard University, Graduate School of Design in 1957. He is the author of Hydra: A Greek Island Town – Its Growth and Form, a pioneering study in the examination of vernacular architecture at the scale of a small Aegean town and The Aegean Crucible: Tracing Vernacular Architecture in Post-Byzantine Centuries, a lavishly  illustrated “scholarly guide-book” to the vernacular architecture of the Aegean  archipelago.

The doctoral work in historical musicology was completed by Diane Touliatos at The Ohio State University’s School of Music under the supervision of her dissertation advisors, Richard Hoppin and Milos Velimirovic.

As a faculty member in the Department of Music at UMSL since  1979 and as a Research Fellow at the Center for  International Studies at UMSL since 1982, Diane Touliatos has  focused her research efforts in Eastern Medieval Chant, Ancient Greek  Music, and Women Composers. In the area of musicology, she has achieved a world-wide reputation as an internationally published scholar. More  specifically in the area of Medieval Byzantine Musicology and Women  Composers, she has become a leading world-wide expert and consequently  an invited speaker at conferences and university seminars all over  Western Europe,Greece, Poland, Russia, and the former Yugoslavia.

As of January, 1997 Diane Touliatos was elected by the  Humanities Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Missouri at St. Louis as Director of the Center for the Humanities.

Touliatos already has five books in international presses: The Byzantine Amomos Chant of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries;  Catalogue of the Byzantine Musical Manuscripts in the Vatican.

Most recently she has published Descriptive  Catalogue of the Musical Manuscripts of the National Library of Greece:  Byzantine Chant and Other Music Repertory Recovered (England: Ashgate Press, 2010) and  Women in the Arts: Eccentric Essays in Music, Visual Arts, and Literature [co-edited with Barbara Harbach] (England: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010). Forthcoming in 2011 is Touliatos’ book HER ART: Greek Women in the Arts from Antiquity to Modernity published in Germany by the Paul Lang Verlag.  Also, Touliatos’  published  transcriptions of Kassia’s music  were recorded by VocaMe with the CD  title, Kassia: Byzantine Hymns of the First Female Composer (c. 810 -843/867) under the Christophorus Record Label of MusiContact in Heidelberg, Germany.

Touliatos has also published over 60 full-length  articles in scholarly refereed journals on various aspects of Ancient  Greek, Eastern Medieval Chant, and women composers. Her research in this area has been varied and exemplifies the following research topics: 1)  Medieval Byzantine sacred chants and their historical place in the  different liturgical rites; 2) comparisons to Medieval Western chants;  3) Medieval Byzantine secular chants; 4) Medieval Western, Byzantine and Ancient Greek womencomposers (discovering the earliest preserved music  by a woman composer); 5) catalogues of Byzantine musical manuscripts;  and 6) serial bibliographies on Eastern musical research.

She is also currently working on the following books: The  Musical Treatise of Ioannes Plousiadenos: Translation, Annotations and  Commentary will reveal the cryptic system of modulation within the  Medieval notation of the Byzantine eight modal system and the use of  proto-polyphony in the performance practice of Byzantine music; Kassia  and Her Musical Contributions will focus on the earliest woman composer  with preserved music and her musical innovations; The Muses: Greek Women in Music in Antiquity and Byzantium will cover the role and musical  contributions of women from Hellenistic Alexandria through the  post-Byzantine era; and The History of Medieval Byzantine Music is a  textbook based on Touliatos’ research and lectures in teaching this  course and includes pioneering research and changes in the discipline  since the Wellesz book was last published in 1961.

Touliatos’ research has been supported by various grants  including the Fulbright Research Grant, several National Endowment for  the Humanities, American Council for Learned Societies, three Weldon  Springs Grants (UMSL), several University of Missouri  system-wide Research Board Grants, and the Alexander Onassis Senior Scholar Research Award.

As a research scholar and teacher, Touliatos attracts  students from all over the world who come to the University of  Missouri-St. Louis campus specifically to study with her in the area of  Greek/Byzantine music. She has also participated as an outside  thesis/dissertation advisor at the Conservatory of the University of Cinncinnati,  University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of  Maryland-Baltimore, City University of New York; and the Macedonian  University of Thessaloniki, Greece. In the Department of Music,  Touliatos teaches every area of Western music history and has developed many new courses in the music  history curriculum. She was awarded the 1990-91 Distinguished Teaching  Award for the Pierre Laclede Honors College of UMSL for the  seminar”Evolution of Western Musical Styles.”

Although not directly related to music, Touliatos  spearheaded the fundraising drive for an endowed Professorship in Modern Greek Language, Literature, and Culture for the UMSL campus. She  worked very diligently in this effort by single-handedly arranging for a benefit concert which reaped $8000 and ultimately secured a grant in  the amount of $150,000 from the Greek Government which helped bring this campaign of $1,500,000 to fruition in January of 1995. This effort was  the first endowed professorship in the College of Arts and Sciences at  the University of Missouri-St. Louis and it led to a host of other  endowed professorships that followed in the college.

On November 17, 2001, Dr. Touliatos received the national  Hellenic Spirit Award, a coveted award for outstanding Greek-Americans.  Past recipients include George Stephanopoulos, Senator Olympia Snowe,  and Michael Dukakis. Touliatos was recognized for her pioneering  research in Medieval Eastern Chant and women composers. Archbishop  Demetrios from New York and Bishop Iakovos from Chicago were present for the event.

Dr. Touliatos was among nine distinguished international  artists and art scholars to receive the golden medallion of Rigas  Velestinis on May 8, 2007 in Athens, Greece. This medallion was awarded  by the President of Greece to distinguished international pioneering  innovators and artists,who have promoted and united the common cultures  of Greece and other Balkan nations. Furthermore, Dr. Touliatos was  appointed a University of Missouri Curators’ (Distinguished) Professor  effective September 1, 2007. The appointment was approved by the Board  of Curators of the University of Missouri system.

For  more information on Touliatos’ published works, see the following:

Video on Youtube

Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Greece