Affiliated Faculty
Affiliated faculty are scholars who have a Ph.D. and specialize in any aspect of Hellenic Studies. Candidates for Affiliate status must be nominated by a UCLA SNF Hellenic Center faculty member and be approved by the Faculty Advisory Committee. Affiliates are generally scholars who are associated with universities or institutions on the west coast or whose research interests intersect with or complement those of faculty members at UCLA. Affiliates may also be scholars who have received their Ph.D. recently and for whom an affiliation with the Center will promote their professional growth.
Chris Kyriakakis, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at USC, received his BS degree from the California Institute of Technology, and his MS and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from USC. His research interests lie at the intersection of acoustics, psychoacoustics, and audio signal processing. His research focuses on acoustical measurement methods of loudspeakers in rooms and device enclosures, and together with his students, he has developed novel signal processing algorithms for optimizing their performance. Other research topics include multichannel audio acquisition and rendering, virtual microphones and virtual speakers, hybrid headphone-loudspeaker rendering methods, and advanced signal processing techniques for optimizing sound quality from small portable devices. His most recent research is in the field of archaeoacoustics with a focus on the capture, characterization, and simulation of the acoustics of medieval Byzantine churches. This is a unique interdisciplinary project that bridges Engineering and Art History. Prof. Kyriakakis has published nearly 100 technical papers, as well as a book entitled Immersive Audio Signal Processing, and holds several patents in the acoustic measurement of loudspeakers in rooms, loudspeaker crossover optimization, and loudspeaker response correction using signal processing. In 2006, he received a World Technology Network Award. This organization presents awards to innovators in several areas in which technology can foster a paradigm change. His award was for innovations in immersive audio that enable new capabilities in media and journalism. Other award recipients that year included Vice President Al Gore, Google, and Space-X.
Christine Philliou, Associate Professor of History at the University of California Berkeley, specializes in the political and social history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey and Greece as parts of the post-Ottoman world. Her book, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (University of California Press, 2011), examines the changes in Ottoman governance leading up to the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. It does so using the vantage point of Phanariots, an Orthodox Christian elite that was intimately involved in the day-to-day work of governance even though structurally excluded from the Ottoman state. Her current work turns to the political, personal, and intellectual/artistic itinerary of the Turkish writer Refik Halit Karay (1888-1965). Her interests and other publications have had to do with comparative empires across Eurasia, various levels of transitions from an “Ottoman” to a “post-Ottoman” world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and political and cultural interfaces in the eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, and Balkans in the early modern and modern eras.
Dr. Giuseppina Silvestri is currently a Lecturer in the UCLA Linguistics Department. Before joining UCLA, Dr. Silvestri was a research associate at the University of Cambridge on the project “Fading Voices in Southern Italy: Investigating language contact in Magna Graecia,” which focused on the severely endangered Greek and Romance varieties that have co-existed in Southern Italy for over two millennia. She has collected undocumented data through face-to-face interviews with locals during field investigations in the Greek-speaking areas of Southern Italy: Bovesìa (Calabria) and Grecìa Salentina (Apulia). Dr. Silvestri’s research work weds traditional scholarship in language variation with the state of the art in historical and formal linguistics, i.e. sub‑fields that are left mostly unconnected in the study of lesser-known minority communities. She also specializes in the analysis of the structural patterns that emerge from the data that speakers of non-standard varieties generously provide to the scientific community. Her studies serve as documentation of the Greek varieties of Southern Italy that are now facing extinction.