Konstantinos Kalantzis was born in Athens, Greece in 1981. He studied History and Archaeology at the University of Crete and Visual Anthropology at the Universities of Oxford (MSc) and London (PhD). His doctoral thesis (2010, UCL) focused on the Sphakia region of highland western Crete and approached the visual as a primary field of social engagement.
Since 2008 he has worked as a post-doctoral researcher in two projects (University of Southampton Koutroulou Magoula Archaeological Ethnography project 2010-12; 15 and Therasia project Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2010-14). These involved archaeological excavations in Cycladic and mainland Greece. There, he explored historical imagination through a focus on what people do with objects. He is also working on materiality and social imagination in the 'Greek debt crisis'.
He has also worked as the "scientist-in-charge" for the Chios Mastic Gum museum which opened in 2016. He has taught anthropology and modern Greek studies (January-June 2016) at San Francisco State University and has also taught anthropology at the University of Bern (Sept 2016-Jan 2017).
His main research interests include: aesthetics and ideology, landscape, postcolonial and critical theory, power, memory, affect, visual and material culture.
He has published work in various outlets including American Ethnologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History and History and Anthropology. He has also directed the ethnographic film
'Dowsing the Past: Materialities of Civil War Memories' (2015) [selection: Athens Ethnographic Film Festival 2015 and Chalkida Documentary Festival 2015].
He has received an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Scholarship (2006-2010), two University of London scholarships (2007) as well as a Mary Seeger O'Boyle Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University (2011-2012).
He is currently a Research Associate at University College London, working in the ERC project "Photodemos-Citizens of Photography" led by C. Pinney. His focus
is on Greek-German social relations during the period often called 'the crisis'.
e-mail address: kkalantzis[at]googlemail.com