My CV
Riki Van Boeschoten completed her undergraduate studies in Italian Literature at the University of Bologna (1972) and Modern Greek Literature and History at the Universities of Utrecht (1974) and Ioannina (1974), and received her Phd from the University of Amsterdam in 1987. The title of her doctoral dissertation, which was published as a book in 1991, was From Armatolik to People's Rule: Investigation into the Collective Memory of Rural Greece (1750-1949). From 1980 to 2000 she worked as a translator for the Greek translation service of the Council of Ministers of the European Union in Brussels. In 2000 Riki joined the Department of History, Archeology and Social Anthropology, University of Thessaly, Greece. Until her retirement in 2015 she was the director of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology and the Oral History Archive of the Department. Her research interests involve the oral memories of World War Two, of political refugees in Eastern Europe and of recent migrants to Greece. From 2004 to 2007 she supervised a research project on gender and migration focusing on migrants from Albania and Bulgaria. From 2011 to 2015 she supervised the oral history part of the research project "DEMUCIV, Designing the City Museum of Volos". She co-authored with fellow anthropologist Loring Danforth a book entitled “Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory” (Chicago University Press, 2011), which in 2013 was awarded the Edmund Keeley Book Prize by the Modern Greek Studies Association. In 2012 Riki took the initiative to set up a Greek Oral History Association and was elected its first President (www.epi.uth.gr). Since 2013 she is a member of the International Editorial Advisory Board of the journal "Oral History". In the fall of 2015 Riki retired from the University of Thessaly.