Faculty
The leading members of the MA faculty, responsible for the four compulsory courses, are Professor and Director of the Postgraduate Program, Betty Kaklamanidou, and Professor Eleftheria Thanouli. Their academic subjects (History & Theory of Cinema & Television and Film Theory) are aligned with the Program’s curriculum. According to the legislation, the teaching staff is complemented by Associate Professor Konstantinos Kefalas, and postdoctoral researcher Evdokia Stefanopoulou. Based on the new law 4957/2023 and thus the new Regulations, starting from the academic year 2024-2025, two new members will join us; Associate Professor Christos Gousios and Assistant Professor Theodoros Papadimitriou. These two colleagues, specializing in sound and music in cinema, will be responsible for two elective courses on the history and theory of sound and music in audiovisual media.
Additionally, two elective courses per year are taught by distinguished members from foreign universities as one of the goals of the Postgraduate Program is to offer our students contact with internationally renowned figures whose research/writing work aligns with the academic subjects of the Program and serves as cutting-edge literature and teaching material at the world’s leading universities. In the first five years of the program, we had the opportunity to host internationally acclaimed faculty members such as Thomas Elsaesser, Stacey Abbott, Diane Negra, Robert A. Rosenstone, Celestino Deleyto, Yannis Tzioumakis, and Deborah Jermyn.
Faculty CVs
Betty Kaklamanidou is a Fulbright scholar and Professor in Film & Television History & Theory at the School of Film at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is the author of Easy A: The End of the High-School Teen Comedy? (2018), The ‘Disguised’ Political Film in Contemporary Hollywood (2016), Genre, Gender and the Effects of Neoliberalism (2013) and two books in Greek on adaptation theory and the history of the Hollywood rom com. Betty is also the editor of New Approaches to Contemporary Adaptation (2020) and co-editor of Contemporary European Cinema: Crisis Narratives and Narratives in Crisis (2018), Politics and Politicians in Contemporary U.S. Television (2016), The Millennials on Film and Television (2014), HBO’s “Girls” (2014), and The 21st Century Superhero (2010). Betty’s articles have appeared in Television & New Media, Literature/Film Quarterly, Celebrity Studies and The Journal of Popular Romance Studies.
Eleftheria Thanouli is Professor in Film Theory at the School of Film at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research interests include the representation of history on film, film narratology, digital cinema, film and politics and world cinema. She is the author of three monographs: Post-classical Cinema: an International Poetics of Film Narration (London: Wallflower Press, 2009), Wag the Dog: a Study on Film and Reality in the Digital Age (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), and She has also contributed chapters in key publications, such as The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory (London: Routledge, 2013), The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013) and The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2016).
Kostas Kefalas is Associate Professor in Film Production at the School of Film at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He studied physics in Athens and film in Athens and Stockholm. Since 1994, he has been working as a Line and Associate Producer in feature films. He has worked in more than 30 feature films in Greece, including some of the most important Greek films of the last decades: Hard Goodbyes by P. Panayotopoulou, The Weeping Meadow by T. Angelopoulos, Gold Dust by M. Manda, Attenberg by A. Tsangari, and Alps by G. Lanthimos. Since 2000 he has been working in theatrical productions and major audiovisual events.
Evdokia Stefanopoulou is adjunct lecturer in Film Studies at the School of Film at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her primary research interests focus on film and television genres with an emphasis on speculative fiction, as well as cinema’s relations with posthumanist, feminist and ecocritical approaches. She received her PhD in 2019 from the School of Film with the highest grade (A with distinction). For her doctoral studies, she received a scholarship for PhD candidates from the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation. Dr. Stefanopoulou’s postdoctoral research received the Excellence in the Humanities Scholarship from the Special Account for Research Funds of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is the author of the monograph The Science Fiction Film in Contemporary Hollywood. A Social Semiotics of Bodies and Worlds (Bloomsbury Press, 2023). She has also published several journal articles and chapters in edited collections, such as Refocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media (Bloomsbury Press, 2023), and On Non-Anglophone European Science Fiction Cinema (Peter Lang, forthcoming).
