Biography

As a Brussels-born Belgian citizen, I was introduced very early in life to the reality of European integration. My specific interest for Central and South East Europe dates back to my first years as a student in Social Anthropology at the Free University Brussels (1992-93), when I was a member of a student organization against ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and organized several workshops on the subject.

After a year in Greece as an Erasmus Student (1994-95), I decided to study Hungarian Literature in Budapest (1995-96). I then conducted research on popular religion in Salina (Italy, 1997). My MA (1997) and doctoral research (1998-2003) were dedicated to the return to legality, after 40 years of prohibition, of the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church in Romania.

I defended my Ph.D. thesis in Social Anthropology, “Towards an Anthropology of Religious Variations: the Re-legalization of the Romanian Greek Catholic Church after 1989” in June 2003 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.

I have recently been invited to edit a volume on the Greek Catholics in Postsocialist Europe in the Halle Series for Social Anthropology. I plan to dedicate a significant part of my research time to the editing of this volume.

In 2003 and 2004, I dedicated my first post-doctoral project, at the Viadrina University (Frankfurt/Oder, Germany), to post-war justice in the former Yugoslavia, with particular focus on the Ovcara/Vukovar massacre trial held in The Hague and Belgrade.

In 2005, during my second post-doctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale, Germany), I investigated the increasing role of religious organizations (with a specific emphasis on the Hungarian Greek Catholic Church) in providing welfare and charitable activities.

During my stay at the EUI, I would like to carry out a project entitled “Religion and Social Security. A Micro Level Analysis on Orthodox Faith-based Welfare Providers in Greece and among Romanian migrants in Italy”. It is inspired by Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic premises, and aims to investigate the increasing role played by religious networks in providing different kinds of social security, especially to migrants coming from South-East Europe, via a qualitative micro-level comparative research, in Greece and Italy. At a more general level, the project also intends to examine the role played by the new global orthodox NGO’s such as International Orthodox Christian Church Charities, Ortaid or Allilevgi (solidarity), the NGO of the Greek Orthodox Church. Do they promote a specific set of values connected with Orthodox morality? How do they interrelate with other European faith-based institutions?