Neni Panourgiá

Neni Panourgiá

Neni Panourgiá is an anthropologist, the Academic Adviser at the Justice-in-Education Initiative, and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Prison Education Program at Columbia University through which she teaches in the New York State and the Federal prison system.  She has previously held positions at Princeton, Rutgers, NYU, Bard College, The New School for Social Research, and Université de Paris VIII, St Denis.  She was co-editor of Anthropology and Humanism (2020-2021), and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies (2013-2016), and co-Chair of the Anthropology Section of the New York Academy of Sciences (2009-2011).  Her ethnographic work is located at the nexus of history, politics, and the apparatus of discipline with specific focus on the multi-valence of confinement. Her monographs Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity. An Athenian Anthropography (1995) and Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State (2009) have received many awards among which The Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, the Edmund Keeley Book Prize in Modern Greek Studies, the PROSE Award, The Chicago Folklore Prize, the International Society for Ethnohistory. She has co-edited, with George Marcus, the volume Ethnographica Moralia. Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology (2008), and has edited the photographic volume East of Attica, 1930-1997, and the Special Issue “COVID-19: Auto-ethnographies of Incarceration” in Synapsis: A Journal of Medical Humanities (2020). Her essays can be found in Mousse, Documenta, American Ethnologist, angelaki, Public Culture, Anthropology and Humanism, and elsewhere. Her book Λέρος: Η γραμματική του εγκλεισμού, published in July 2020 in Greek (Nefeli Publishers), is in its second edition and it is forthcoming shortly in English under the title Foucault’s Node: Leros and the Grammar of Confinement.

https://justiceineducation.columbia.edu/people/profiles/neni-panourgia/. Since 2022 she has been running the Leros Humanism Seminars, https://leros-humanism-seminars.com, co-organized with Stathis Gourgouris and in collaboration with Columbia Global Centers Athens, thee Johns Hopkins Initiative in Global South Humanities, and the Wright-Ingraham Institute.