Dimitrios Stergiopoulos

I am a PhD candidate at the History department of the University of California San Diego under the supervision of Thomas Gallant. My research interests are centered on the transformation of Southeastern Europe and the Middle East from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries due to the incorporation of the region into the capitalist world economy. In my PhD, I am focusing on the economic and political role of the bankers and merchants in Athens and Istanbul from the end of the Crimean War until the war of 1897 between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Specifically, I investigate how these strata navigated the turbulent conjuncture of the 1870s when a social, economic, and political crisis affected the region, and how they used these multiple crises in order to consolidate their position as social and economic elites. For my research, I am mainly using primary sources from non-state historical actors, such as newspapers, pamphlets, ego-documents, biographies, memoirs, family archives and private correspondence in Greek, Ottoman Turkish, English and French.

• BA in Turkish and Modern Asian Studies - National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, 2013
• MA in Middle Eastern Studies - Leiden University, Netherlands, 2015