Professor Elena Isayev
Status/discipline:
Classics and ancient history
Contact Details:
Current Project:
Leads an AHRC/UKRI GCRF Network+ Imagining Futures through Un/Archived Pasts. Am on UNDRR/ICCROM expert panel.
Elena Isayev's work focuses on migration, hospitality, and displacement, which she has written about in Migration Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy (Cambridge 2017), Displacement and the Humanities (2021) (edited with Evan Jewell), and for the Red Cross (2017). It also touches on the four strands that are key to her research and practice: Community as Intersection of Mobilities – working with knowledge-holders who draw on expertise that may include lived experience; Hospitality, Asylum, Migration; Potency of Displaced Agency; Common and Public Space. This research includes work with colleagues in Palestine, of Campus in Camps and Decolonizing Architecture, and as part of investigations for the UNDRR/ICCROM expert panel on indigenous knowledge systems in disaster and risk reduction. It also touches on many strands that are part of the international project she is leading Imagining Futures through Un/Archived Pasts (AHRC, UKRI-GCRF funded), and the initiatives of which she is co-founder: AlMaisha – a communal learning platform that tackles urgencies such as displacement, diaspora, and citizenship beyond state practices; ROUTES – an interdisciplinary platform at University of Exeter that focuses on Migration, Mobility and Displacement; as well as Knowledges in Transit with Staffan Müller-Wille. All these initiatives underpin her work at Potsdam as DAAD GuestProfessor, teaching courses and running lecture series and workshops on migration and displacement that are geared to build the foundation for a Migration Studies Program especially with colleagues Professors Fillipo Carla-Uhink and Marcia Schenck. When she is not in Potsdam she is Professor of Ancient History and Place at the University of Exeter, UK.
