Carrières des docteurs
& HDR
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Careers of doctors and HDR: where have they ended up?
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Tasso Anastassiadis (PhD in History from Sciences Po) was elected last July as Assistant Professor at McGill University (Montreal)
 We offer him our warmest congratulations.
Tasso Anastassiadis completed his thesis in 2006 on the subject "How to reform a traditionalist institution? The Greek Orthodox Church and secularisation at the time of the formation of the national state, 1852-1936" under the direction of Marc Lazar, Professor of Universities at Sciences Po, Director of the Department of History.
Here is a written interview with Tasso.
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Introduction |
I have just started work at McGill.
An intercontinental move is always complex, but McGill has done everything possible to make sure that I settle in well.
The beginning of the academic year is exciting and extremely busy, full of meetings with different sections of the university, introductions and explanations of how things work here. This week is also a key moment for meeting colleagues from all departments and building a network of contacts.
This has all been very pleasant. McGill is quite a unique campus in that it combines two ancient European university traditions: that of a campus in retreat from the world and that of a university situated at the heart of the City. McGill is situated at the foot of the wooded Mt Royal that dominates Montreal’s skyline, and yet still in the centre of town.
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What did Sciences Po bring to the preparation of your thesis? |
I have a multidisciplinary and international background driven by a curiosity that goes beyond my area of specialisation.
Academics who are cultivated and well-rounded (which is very different from the kind of glossy general knowledge provided by manuals of general culture), who forensically apply a range of methodological tools to well-defined subjects impress me much more than experts who are obsessed with one subject, one set of archives, one area or one period.
Sciences Po has allowed me to indulge this passion for learning in all areas through its varied seminars, the accessibility of its library and the availability of its many electronic resources.
But this passion can be frightening to some!
It is funny that despite all the lip service paid to interdisciplinarity and openness, our milieu remains very closed and prefers people who work on the same subject with the same network all their lives, rather than others whose work is “unstable” or unpredictable.
Very few institutions in France take the risk of encouraging these wild cards and trying to harness their “instability” (in fact in our field, I can only think of two). Over the past few years, Sciences Po ahs become one such institution. Sciences Po also prepares us more to seek outside the French university, as in my case.
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What do you believe made McGill decide to hire you? |
To begin with, all the elements I’ve just cited.
McGill was looking for a historian for its History department who was both a specialist of the contemporary period but also able to work on synchrony and diachrony and study a geographical and cultural area while situating it in a continental and/or global context; as well as a program developer capable of working with other departments and with experience of institutional partnerships.
It was also an opportunity for McGill to have a bilingual French-English professor and to develop, through my professional networks, its contact with France, which is particularly important given the bicultural particularity of McGill: an Anglophone university in a Francophone city and province with a large number of students whose first language is French.
The difference is striking: in France, networks favour endogamy. Over there, it’s the development of networks by exogamy that counts. In saying that I am not idealising the situation. McGill is a prestigious institution in a competitive environment. Nothing is done by chance, there are “political” and money questions there too, but unlike most institutions I’ve seen, the rules of the game are explicit.
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What are your research and teaching projects over the next few years and what does McGill offer to help you achieve them? |
At first I will teach a class on the formation of the Greek state as it emerged from under Ottoman rule in its regional, Mediterranean and European context, a subject that will match with my research on the formation of bureaucratic apparatuses and institutional reform.
After all, this has been a hot item in the news for the past year.
Another aspect will look at the influence of classical heritage down the centuries (especially in the 19th and 20th centuries) to shed light on the (disproportionate) influence of Greece in world affairs.
From this perspective, 2011 is no different from 1821 (the beginning of the Greek War of Independence and the Philhellenic movement) or 1946-47 (the Greek Civil War, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan)
The positive aspect is that as a teacher (even as a newcomer) we are encouraged to contribute to program building and directed towards the people who can help us do this.
Lastly, I will take part in collective research on the transformation of educational systems in the eastern Mediterranean since the 18th century in relation to the interfaith question.
To make my job easier, McGill will give me a research assistant and a three-year research grant to begin with. As soon as I arrived, I was “taken in hand” by a service that will allow me to apply for larger research grants and will take care of the logistics side of it for me.
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Mini-Bio of Tasso Anastassiadis: After multidisciplinary studies in the United States and France followed by professional experience in the private sector, Tasso Anastassiadis passed the History aggregation and completed a Ph.D. at Sciences Po, supervised by Marc Lazar. His thesis examined the role of militants and crises in the process of institutional reform in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean with a focus on religious actors and the educational sector in the 19th and 20th centuries. He pursued and enlarged these themes for the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans during a three-year stay as an academic member of the Ecole Française d’Athènes (EFA), where he studied the role of missionaries and religious minorities as actors and issues stimulating institutional reforms in the different Balkan states that became independent from the Ottoman Empire in the interwar period. He also piloted an international research project through the EFA on interfaith relations in the eastern Mediterranean since 1854. His interest in education, educational reform, the appropriation of models across time and space and the interactions between actors and countries have led him to publish articles in six languages and to participate in the external CAPES jury in history-geography. |
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