MGSA Innovation Grant Fund Recipients: October 2025
MGSA exec. director
The MGSA Innovation Fund Committee is pleased to announce the award of three (3) Innovation Grants for the October 2025 cycle.
Ugo Mondini, British Academy Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Oxford
$1,000
Award to partly support travel for speakers to a workshop --the second in a series-- titled Writing, Using, and Transmitting a Language in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean (1050–1550), to be held at Balliol College, Oxford, in June 2026. The project adopts a cross- and interdisciplinary approach to explore how languages were transmitted and preserved across different periods, contexts, and settings in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean. It will comparatively examine the strategies employed by polities and communities; the relationship between literacy and spoken languages, the factors driving the development of new teaching methods in medieval and early modern societies, as well as their long-term impact on writing practices. By integrating history and historical sociolinguistics, the project includes the work of scholars of Medieval & Modern Greek language and literature within the broader, interconnected Mediterranean world.
Eleni Karantzola, Laboratory of Southeastern Mediterranean Linguistics, University of the Aegean
$1,000
Award to support building an aggregator that integrates and cross-links all major Early Modern Greek dictionaries compiled between the 16th and 18th centuries. Drawing inspiration from Logeion, the multi-dictionary portal developed at the University of Chicago, the aggregator will provide unified and user-friendly access to lexicographic resources that until now have remained scattered and underutilized. By consolidating multiple dictionaries into a single searchable environment, it will also facilitate research into the codification practices of lexicographers of the period. This grant will help defray some personnel costs associated with digitization and dissemination of results.
Maria Boletsi, University of Amsterdam & Leiden University; Dr. Nikolas Kakkoufa, Columbia University; Dr. Ilios Willemars, Leiden University; Geli Mademli, University of Amsterdam
$1,000
Award to support the interdisciplinary project Beyond Island Utopias: Transscalar Narratives of Loss, Connection, and Sustainability on Tilos, which seeks to develop innovative ways of narrating Tilos’s layered histories of migration, extinction, sustainability, and cultural and ecological loss. By shifting from paradigms of isolation to transscalar connectivity, this multi-stage project advances Modern Greek Studies as a field that is globally relevant, interdisciplinary, and engaged with urgent issues. MGSA support will help build the project’s pilot website and feature project framework and activities, travel reports, audiovisual documentation, 3D renditions of collected objects, and workshop output. More features will be added in the future, with additional funding, including an interactive map of Tilos.
Congratulations to all our award recipients! And sincere thanks to all applicants for sharing their work with the committee.