Renee Hirschon

Renée Hirschon 

Professor of Social Anthropology 

Affiliation: School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
Expert in: Forced migration, Diaspora, Gender and sexuality in migration
Geographic focus: Greece, Aegean, Balkan and eastern Mediterranean societies

Renée Hirschon, BA Cape Town, MA DPhil Oxf, was educated at the Universities of Cape Town, Chicago, and Oxford.  She was Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University befire becoming Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of the Aegean from 1987 and Chair of the department until 1998. She has long been a Research Associate of the Refugee Studies Centre, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. She is currently Senior Research Fellow at St Peter's College, and a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the European Studies Centre and of South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX) St Antony's College, University of Oxford. Her major study was among Asia Minor refugees who settled in Piraeus, Greece, following the 1923 Lausanne Convention which specified the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey. This resulted in the monograph Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe (2nd edn., 1998). Her most recent publication, an edited volume Crossing the Aegean (2003, 2004), is a bilateral appraisal of the long-term effects of 'ethnic cleansing' on both countries. She is concerned with the relevance of anthropological knowledge to contemporary conditions, and her research interests include migration, cosmology, gender, and linguistic behaviour.

Her research interests include: 

• Identity, disporas, forced migration, refugees
• Cosmology, ritual, spatial organization
• Gender, ethnography of speaking
• Socio-cultural change, 'applied' anthropology
• Modern Greek society, Aegean, Balkan and eastern Mediterranean societies