Hagia Sophia: What Just Happened?

Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou

Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou is a faculty member at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where she directs the Initiative on Religion, Law, and Diplomacy.  She is non-resident Senior Fellow and Co-Chair of the Working Group on Christians and Religious Pluralism in the Middle East, at the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, and was non-resident Senior Fellow in National Security and the Middle East, at the Center for American Progress.  She is a Co-President of Religions for Peace International.  Prodromou served as Vice Chair and Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (2004-2012) and was a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Religion & Foreign Policy Working Group (2011-2015).  Her research interests focus on geopolitics and religion, with particular focus on the Middle East and Southeastern Europe.  The author of multiple edited volumes and many publications in scholarly and policy journals, Prodromou is a frequent commentator and contributor in US and international media.  She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Dr. Alexandros K. Kyrou

Alexandros (Aleko) Kyrou is Professor of History and Director of the Program in East European and Russian Studies at Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts, where he teaches on the Balkans, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire. Since completing his Ph.D. in East European history at Indiana University, Dr. Kyrou has been a Research Fellow in the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, the Kokkalis Program on Southeastern and East-Central Europe at Harvard University, and the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia. His many and diverse book chapter and journal article publications focus on famine relief in Axis-occupied Greece, Greek-America and Balkan Diasporas, Orthodoxy and the origins of International humanitarianism, and war and peace in Byzantium.

Dr. Kyrou has also written numerous essays and commentaries on Greek history, the Greek American community, Byzantine civilization, and Ottoman history and Turkish politics, as well as the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Genocides for popular, professional, and policy publications. In 2015, Professor Kyrou was awarded a “Letter of Honor and Recognition for Scholarship in Byzantine Studies” by His All-Holiness Bartholomew I, Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, and Ecumenical Patriarch.