Dimitra Vassiliadou

Dimitra Vassiliadou is Associate Professor of Social History at the University of the Aegean's Department of Social Anthropology and History. She serves as Principal Investigator for the "Brutal Intimacies. A History of Rape in Modern Greece, 1900s-1960s" research project, funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation (2021-2023). Her academic work bridges social anthropology and historical research with a focus on gender, sexuality, and emotional history in Greece.

Dr. Vassiliadou's research interests span gender history with particular emphasis on masculinities, the history of sexuality and sexual violence, family history, the history of nervous disorders, and the history of emotions. Her work examines how gender norms, sexual practices, and emotional expressions evolved in Greek society from the 19th through the 20th centuries. She approaches these topics through interdisciplinary methodologies that combine historical analysis with anthropological insights, examining both institutional structures and individual experiences. Her research often focuses on how power dynamics, social hierarchies, and cultural values shaped personal relationships and bodily experiences.

Her recent publications reveal consistent engagement with emotional and sexual histories in Greece, examining topics from neurasthenia in the Belle Époque to marital sexuality across the 20th century. These works demonstrate methodological innovation through the analysis of judicial records, personal narratives, and medical texts to reconstruct historical experiences of gender, sexuality, and emotion. Her scholarship contributes significantly to understanding how sexual norms, emotional expressions, and gender identities were constructed and contested in Greek history.

Dr. Vassiliadou has secured significant research funding, including the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation grant for her work on the history of rape in modern Greece. She has directed multiple research projects examining gender, sexuality, and social history in Greece, often working collaboratively with other historians and multidisciplinary teams. Her research has been supported by various academic institutions and funding bodies, reflecting the significance of her contributions to historical scholarship.

She teaches undergraduate courses including History of Sexuality: European and Greek Perceptions (19th-20th c.) and Introduction to History, as well as graduate courses on A History of Private Life (18th-20th c.), History of Crime and Violence, and Methodologies in History and Anthropology. Her teaching reflects her research expertise, connecting theoretical frameworks with historical case studies to examine how gender, sexuality, and power have shaped social relations throughout modern Greek history.