Maria Kaliambou

Maria Kaliambou is a senior lector II in the Hellenic Studies Program. She earned her B.A. in History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and her Ph.D. in Folklore Studies and European Ethnology at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Germany. She then held post-doctoral positions at the University Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3 and Princeton University.

Her research situates folklore in a broader interdisciplinary net, combining literature, book history, and diaspora studies. In 2006, she published her first book, Home – Faith – Family: Transmission of Values in Greek Popular Booklets of Tales (1870–1970) (in German), and in 2015, she published The Routledge Modern Greek Reader. Greek Folktales for Learning Modern Greek. In 2023, she published an edited volume, The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States (in English and in Greek). She is currently working on a new book with the tentative title The Book Culture of Greek Americans.

Professor Kaliambou is also interested in foreign language pedagogy, especially teaching Modern Greek. She has been the Chair of the Modern Greek Special Interest Group at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and is a certified Oral Proficiency Interview tester for Modern Greek.

She has received several awards. In 2006, her dissertation received the “Lutz Röhrich prize” in Germany as the best dissertation in oral literature, and in 2011 the European Commission elected her as “Erasmus Student Ambassador of Greece”. In 2024, the Modern Greek Studies Association awarded her the Vassiliki Karagiannaki Best Edited Book Prize in Modern Greek Studies for The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States.