Dimitrios Mitsopoulos

Columbia University

M. Alison Frantz Fellow, Gennadius Library

Research Topic: The Empire of Smuggling: Illicit Mobility and the (Re-)Making of the Eastern Mediterranean, 1910s–1930s

Dimitris Mitsopoulos is a PhD candidate in Modern European History at Columbia University. He did his studies in Thessaloniki and Berlin before joining Columbia. His dissertation, The Empire of Smuggling: Illicit Mobility and the (Re-)Making of the Eastern Mediterranean, explores how illicit exchange and mobility shaped the social and political reconfiguration of the Eastern Mediterranean in the decades following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, as new states worked to assert authority over borders, movement, and trade. During his fellowship year, he will be conducting research across several of the ASCSA's archival collections, including the Philippos Dragoumis, Stephanos Dragoumis, Elias Petropoulos, and Konstantinos D. Karavidas papers.

This material will enable the study of local administration and cross-border exchange in Greece and situate individual mobility trajectories within the broader institutional and cultural frameworks of the interwar Eastern Mediterranean.