About - Vasilis Molos

I am currently the Director and Research Lead of the HHF Greek Canadian Archives at York University. In this role, I oversee the archive’s operations, promote and facilitate research on its collections, and build strategic partnerships with donors and collaborators. Before beginning this role, I taught history at New York University Abu Dhabi, New York University, and Fordham University. My primary fields of interest include modern Greek history, identity, transnational and connected histories, and writing history from the margins.

My book manuscript is titled The Russian Mediterranean: Shaping Sovereignty and Selfhood on the Island of Paros, 1768-1789, and is under contract with Edinburgh University Press. The manuscript tells the story of the short-lived Russian Archipelagic Principality (1770-1775). Established in the Aegean Sea during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768-1774, this semi-autonomous polity occupied a liminal position between Europe, Asia, and Africa, the Latin West and Greek East, and Orthodox Russia and the Islamic Porte. The manuscript describes the efforts to refashion the transformational space through an exploration of the political claims of its inhabitants. It reveals how adventurers, displaced pashas, enterprising privateers, militant clerics, Moorish slaves, prisoners of war, rebels, and refugees reconceptualized sovereignty and selfhood through a range of biological, moral, and sentimental vocabularies. Challenging the notion of “Ottoman Greece” as an intellectual hinterland, this manuscript uncovers the expansive intellectual networks its protagonists inhabited. In tracing the transmission of knowledge between this “contact zone” and various centers of Enlightenment, it recasts the Russian Aegean as an important site of conceptual innovation.

As an expansion to my earlier work, my second book project will provide the first comprehensive account of the disturbances that unsettled the eastern Mediterranean in 1770. Tentatively titled The Greek Revolution of 1770: Faith, Fatherland, and Freedom in the Age of Revolutions, this project examines personal correspondences, diplomatic dispatches, newspaper accounts, petitions submitted to Russian and Ottoman courts, as well as notable works of Greek scholarship produced at this time. In so doing, it reassembles a history previously partitioned among national historiographies. Highlighting the diversity of claims advanced by rebels and loyalists, clergy and laypeople, imperial officials, and merchants, the manuscript retrieves a cultural universe characterized by shifting political visions and affiliations. The Greek Revolution of 1770 challenges previous accounts of this event as a Russian-inspired uprising or an anti-Ottoman rebellion. It contests entrenched orthodoxies on nationalism, revealing how the collective action of disparate groups, with different goals, motives, and worldviews, engendered Greek nationalism as a mode of political expression, well before it was theorized into existence.

– Vasilis Molos