Konstantina Zanou

Konstantina Zanou discovered her life’s work as a result of a misunderstanding.

Zanou was a student at the University of Athens when she decided to do a semester of study abroad in Italy. Not yet fluent in the language, Zanou signed up for what she thought was Renaissance art, but it was actually a history course on the Risorgimento, the national movement for Italian unification. “And that is how I became a historian of 19th-century Italy,” she says with a laugh.

Zanou, an associate professor of Italian and the department’s director of undergraduate studies, specializes in Mediterranean history, with an emphasis on culture and nationalism in Italy and Greece. She grew up as a refugee in Cyprus, in a society divided between Greek and Turkish communities. Her father is a theater director who created small roles for her; Zanou’s comfort in that environment led her to spend three years studying and per- forming at the National Theatre of Greece Drama School.

But her parents also urged her to find a practical backup to acting, so she started taking courses in history and archaeology in Athens, which suited her better. “I was so much happier,” Zanou says. “The product of my work was a thesis, and not me. But in hindsight, theater was very useful to the way I perceive history, and write about it.”

After finding her passion for Italian history in Padua, she pursued an M.A. in London, and then earned a Ph.D. at the University of Pisa (in conjunction with a “European Doctorate” from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris) in 2007. Her dissertation was written in three languages; Zanou observes that for many Europeans of her generation, scholarship was encouraged to be transnational and multilingual. “We were meant to be academic hybrids — able to work anywhere, not connected to any home country or department,” she says.

Having wrestled with questions of national identity since childhood, Zanou expanded her research focus to the Mediterranean, a multicultural region comprising 21 coastal countries. She taught in England and France while also spending time in Bulgaria and New York City (she was a Fulbright scholar at NYU); she started at Columbia in 2016.

Since then, Zanou’s classes have included “Nationalism in Theory and History” and “The Making of Italy”; she also developed with a colleague a two-part series, “Mediterranean Humanities,” for the Global Core, and established opportunities for undergraduates at the Columbia Global center in Athens.

“Mediterranean Humanities II,” which Zanou teaches, considers how the area, whose citizens represent a broad array of religious, ethnic, social and political differences, became canonized as the cradle of Western civilization. Zanou’s 2018 book on a related topic, Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800–1850: Stammering the Nation, won the 2019 Edmund Keeley Book Prize in Modern Greek Studies, the 2019 Marraro Prize in Italian History and the 2020 Mediterranean Seminar Best Book Prize.

Her second book, Sea of Antiquities: The Cesnola Brothers, the Global Mediterranean, and the Making of the Modern Museum, about the emergence of archaeology, the collection of Cypriot antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the advent of authenticity as a value, is forthcoming. And Zanou is already at work on her third, an island history of the modern Mediterranean.

For each, Zanou employs a method called “microhistory”: interpreting big geopolitical events through the lenses of individual lives. “Worlds can collapse in one generation, and even as a historian, you realize that people can never really be prepared — you just improvise” she says. “So I like to do a close-up, like in a movie, to focus on specific stories and small details.”

It’s a viewpoint that she says is very much influenced by her theatrical back- ground. Zanou, who received the 2024 Division of Humanities Award for Com- munity Building & Engagement, says she also enjoys the callback to performance that happens in front of the classroom.

“It’s like creating an atmosphere of communication,” she says. “Teaching brings in the element of connection with other people, of creating together, that I loved in my theater past.”

She also encourages her students to, in a way, take a lesson from her personal history and stay open to the unexpected. “They make all these plans, and I’ve noticed a mentality that if you don’t use a skill you’ve learned as a career, to earn money, that somehow it’s a waste,” Zanou says. “But I think many things find their place and value in what you do later — the pieces come together. I tell them, ‘You are a unique assemblage of your path.’”