Speakers

Giorgos Antoniou is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and received his PhD from the European University Institute, Florence in 2007. He has been a Research Fellow of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah in Paris (2005-2007) and a visiting lecturer at Yale University (2007-2008). His research interests include the legacy and memory of conflicts in post-conflict societies; the Holocaust in Greece; the study of collective memory and wars, and public history He has published in various journals, including the Journal of Peace Research, History and Theory, Memoria e Ricerca, and others.  His most recent publication is the Holocaust in Greece (with Dirk Moses), Cambridge University Press, 2018. He is a member of IHRA and current holder of the International Chair of WWII in ULB in Belgium.

Dr. Ulrich Baumann, historian, born 1967, is Deputy Director of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and studied at universities in Freiburg and Berlin. His dissertation entitled “Zerstörte Nachbarschaften” (‘Destroyed Neighbourhoods’) is on Christians and Jews in South German rural and small town communities (published 2000). From 1999 to 2003, he was research assistant for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, and served from 2002 – 2005 as one of the curators of the permanent exhibition at the Information Centre at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and subsequently as curator and coordinator of several other exhibitions, such as “Was damals Recht war”, “Soldaten und Zivilisten vor Gerichten der Wehrmacht” (Victims of Nazi Military Justice), “Fire! Anti-Jewish Terror in November 1938”, “Facing Justice – Adolf Eichmann on Trial”, “Mass Shootings” and “The Holocaust from the Baltic to the Black Sea 1941–1944”. Aside from the foundation´s work, he has been pursuing a publication project on a gender history of female entrepreneurs and business owners in Berlin between 1900 and 1961.

Dr. Evanghelos Chekimoglou is an economist and historian (PhD, MA, BA) who is currently Principal Curator of the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki.  He has served as the Director of the following institutions: National Bank of Greece- Cultural Centre for Northern Greece, Businessmen’s Cultural Society for Northern Greece, and Mount Athos Photographic Archive. He has also served as Directing Consultant at the newspaper Makedonia and worked as a columnist and historical series writer for Greek newspapers (currently for Ethnos).  In addition, he has produced several history series for Greek television.  Publisher of the history magazine Thessalonikeon Polis (23 volumes), he has curated more than fifty exhibitions. As a scholar, he has written more than one hundred papers and forty research books pertaining to Greek business history and the local history of Thessaloniki.

Stratos Dordanas was born on September 2, 1968, in the city of Stuttgart, Germany. He has participated in numerous academic conferences in Greece and abroad, as well as in graduate seminars and symposia. He is a regular member of the Greek Historical Society. Since 2013, he has been Assistant Professor in History, Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki, Greece). His interests are focused on the study of relations between Germany and the Balkan countries (19th-20th century), as well as on questions regarding the history of the Greek Macedonian region. He specializes in political-diplomatic and social history, in the study of military and civil conflicts, and in the two world wars.

Dr. Marc Grellert teaches at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and is co-founder of the company Architectura Virtualis. The focus of his research and work are Virtual Reconstructions and conveying of knowledge with the help of digital media.  In 1994 he initiated the Virtual Reconstruction of synagogues destroyed by the Nazis. In 2007 he received his doctorate in the potentials of digital technology for the culture of remembrance.

Karen Jungblut, Director of Global Initiatives, USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education, University of Southern California. Dipl.-Pol. (Freie Universität Berlin).
Karen Jungblut oversees and manages a global portfolio of partnerships and programs for USC Shoah Foundation. With the USC Shoah Foundation since 1996, Karen led an international and multilingual staff to successfully index the archive of 55,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses, developed and implemented methodologies to index newly added video testimonies of other genocides and mass violence. , an initiative integrating videotaped Holocaust testimony taken by other organizations around the world into the Visual History Archive. In the past five years, Karen has developed approaches to the documentation of more current events of mass violence, as well as headed the production and piloting of USC Shoah Foundation’s program.

Erato Koutsoudaki–Yerolymbou studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens, graduating in 2000, after which she worked as a freelance architect for 15 years. She also holds an MSc in Museology and Cultural Heritage Management from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the University of Western Macedonia (2006). Over the last 14 years, she has been working both in the public and private sector running a successful exhibition design studio, EY CULTURE SERVICES. Erato is vividly involved in public discourse concerning museums in Greece and her work has been exhibited and published both locally and abroad. In the course of many years, her practice has developed an expertise in the field of industrial heritage, as well as in historical and thematic museums. Please visit www.eratokoutsoudaki.com for further information on her studio's activities.

Dr. Thomas Lutz is the Head of the Memorial Museums Department at the Topography of Terror Foundation. Following his training as a teacher of History and Social Studies, Dr. Lutz supervised the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace for German groups as a conscientious objector at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial. He then established the Memorial Museums Department, publishes the GedenkstättenRundbrief (actual No. 195), and the Online-GedenkstättenForum, which coordinates the work of memorials to Nazi victims in Germany with increasingly more international connections. Among others he has founded the IC MEMO (International Committee for Memorial Museums for Victims of Public Crimes; ICOM), and is a German delegate to the IHRA, and an advisor to UNESCO on different projects in South-East-Europe.

Alkmini Paka was born in Thessaloniki in 1957 and graduated from Anatolia College in 1975. She is an architect – engineer (diploma /Aristotle University of Thessaloniki /1981). She holds a M. Arch from the University of California – Berkeley (1982), a “Diplome d' Etudes Approfondies” (D.E.A.) in ‘’Géographie – Aménagement du Patrimoine” from the Université de Paris IV - Sorbonne (1984) and a M.A. in Conversation Studies from the I.A.A.S. - University of York, U.K. (1985).
She has worked as a researcher at the Academy of Architecture in Paris (1987-1989), as an architect restorer and exhibition designer for the Greek Ministry of Culture (1993-2000) and as a free-lance architect (1989-1993 / 2000-  ). From 2005 to 2017, she taught in the post graduate program of the Greek Open University “Environmental Design of Cities and Buildings”. She was elected lecturer of architectural and urban design, at the School of Architecture A.U.Th. in 2004 and she is currently associate professor & Head of the School of Architecture at A.U.Th.. She has designed numerous museum exhibitions and carried out private and public design projects.

Valentin Schneider holds a PhD in History (Université de Caen, 2013) and a PhD in Politics & International Relations (University of Nottingham, 2016). He specializes in the everyday life in Europe during and after the Second World War and is an expert on military occupation, war captivity and burial culture. He has curated various exhibitions for institutional organizations in France and is an author of several books. He is currently managing a three-year project at the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens that is fully funded by the German ministry of foreign affairs through the "German-Greek Fund for the Future", with the goal of creating a database of the German military units that were present in Greece between 1941 and 1944/45. More information: www.valentinschneider.eu

Tasos Telloglou has been working since 1989 for various Greek TV stations as a reporter and co-anchor. He has presented over 240 TV series in different formats for Mega Channel Star Channel, NET, Skai TV and Antenna TV. His latest TV series was ‘Survivors “(on the Mati disaster, SKAI October 2018) and “Greek Bankruptcy” (6 part series, Skai TV, May 2019).
From 1990 to 1997 he was the Germany correspondent of Kathimerini and Mega Channel. He entered journalism in 1986 for the Proti newspaper. From 1989 to 1997 and from 2007 to 2018 he worked for Kathimerini. From 2001 to 2003 he worked for the newspaper To Vima as a reporter. From 2011 to 2018 he collaborated with the investigative team of Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. Tasos Telloglou studied law in Athens speaks English and German. He has co-authored with Alexis Papahelas the book “17 “on the terrorist group “November 17th” (ESTIA 2002), the book City of Games (ESTIA 2004) and “The Network, the Siemens Slush Funds “(Skai 2010). In 2010 he was awarded the Botsis award for defending the public interest in the investigation on the Siemens slush funds case.

Venetia (Vanessa) Tsakalidou graduated from the School of Architecture, AUTh with honors. She holds a PhD in architectural design from AUTh and an M.Arch from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL. She was senior editor of annual review KTIRIO: Architecture+Design and international review Architecture in Greece and co-author in Modernism and Architectural Education, do_co.mo.mo_03 (2007) and Memory–Museum–City (2013). She is the National Selector for the International Piranesi Award. She is currently an assistant professor at AUTh, teaching architectural design and theory, and is a founding member of the award winning studio 40.22.ARCHITECTS in Thessaloniki.