Winner of the 2026 MGSA John O. Iatrides Prize for the Best PhD Dissertation in USA & Canada: Amanda Marie Kubic (University of Michigan, PhD) for Animating Antiquity: Classical (Dis)embodiments by Modern Women.
MGSA exec. director
The committee also recognizes Kutay Onaylı (Princeton University, PhD) with an Honorable Mention for A Laughing Matter: Identity, Alienation, and Imperial Collapse in Ottoman Greek Popular Writing.
The three members of the Iatrides Prize committee were Matthew Gumpert (Bogazici University), Despina Lalaki (City Tech, CUNY), and chair Lissi Athanasiou-Krikelis (New York Institute of Technology). The committee wishes to emphasize the exceptional quality of all the dissertations submitted for consideration. The range of topics and methodologies reflected the vitality of contemporary Modern Greek Studies and demonstrated how emerging scholars are forging new directions for the field through ethnographic, linguistic, archival, historical, and literary research.
Amanda Kubic's dissertation distinguished itself through its originality, intellectual ambition, elegant prose, and sophisticated interdisciplinary approach. Combining close textual analysis with research in dance and performance studies, the project offers a compelling reimagining of classical reception through the lenses of gender, embodiment, disability, and cultural inheritance. It examines how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Greek and Anglo-American women and gender-diverse artists creatively reinterpret classical Greco-Roman texts, figures, and forms, drawing on sources such as the fragments of Sappho, the Venus de Milo, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. More specifically, it argues that contemporary artists, dancers, photographers, and poets—including Mary Duffy, Loie Fuller, Robin Coste Lewis, Olga Broumas and T. Begley, and Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke—produce forms of "classical (dis)embodiment" that fragment, transform, and multiply the body in ways that challenge traditional ideals of the classical body as male, white, singular, and fixed, while opening space for queer, racialized, disabled, and other non-normative identities.
The award comes with a prize of $2,000, a one year membership in the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA) and $500 toward travel expenses to attend the Symposium. It will be presented at the 29th MGSA Symposium in Chicago.
The prize honors John O. Iatrides, who was born in Thessaloniki and was educated in Greece, the Netherlands and the United States (Ph.D. international politics, Clark University, 1962). He served with the Hellenic National Defense General Staff as NATO liaison officer (1955-56) and the prime minister’s press office (1956-58). He taught courses on contemporary Greek politics at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, New York universities and the University of the Aegean and is Connecticut State University Professor Emeritus in Political Science. During 1980-2004 he served as Executive Director of the Modern Greek Studies Association and editor of the MGSA Bulletin.
https://mgsa.org/Prizes/disspriz.html
Congratulations to all the graduate students who shared their work with the MGSA. We wish you every luck and success in your work and career!