Stavroula Pipyrou

Stavroula Pipyrou has conducted long-term ethnographic research with minorities in Italy since 2006. In her first monograph The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Minority Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) she presents a theory of “Fearless Governance” – overlapping and sometimes contradictory systems of power, authority, and relational networks that enable the minority to achieve political representation at the intersection of local, national, and global encounters.

Her three-year Leverhulme project, “An Intergenerational Analysis of Forced Child-relocation in Italy”, looks at the silenced stories of displacement in Cold War (1950s) South Italy shedding light on a hitherto overlooked historico-political period of turmoil. Child displacement is directly associated with historical macro-silences and the lack of systematic ethnological studies on the events that took place during the Cold War period in Italy.

Stavroula has also published on irony, secondhand clothes markets and civil society (Italy) as well as dance, performance, Pontian refugee identity, and death (Greece). She has recently been a Co-I on an ESRC Urgency Grant on the ‘migration crisis’ in Italy and Greece. Stavroula is the Founding Director of the Centre for Minorities Research at St Andrews, an interdisciplinary platform aimed at comprehensively researching the complex challenges facing minorities in Scotland and beyond. She also sits on the British School at Athens Search Committee, the Runciman Award Committee and the AAA Society for the Anthropology of Europe board.