Regardless, thanks to the emphasis our senior administration is now placing on the college's research profile, I believe that such accomplishments will be more and more common at ACT. What better moment to introduce the larger ACT community (alumni and students especially) to the types of research some of our faculty are currently undertaking.

The most significant recent news in the division pertains to the publication of Maria Kyriakidou's book on the gendering of politics in contemporary Greece. Maria is particularly interested in such issues as the controversy regarding electoral quotas for women, the extent of women's active participation in municipal proceedings, the construction of gendered political identities, and the interface between the private/domestic and the public/political domains.

Other research projects Maria is currently undertaking include a history of Thessaloniki based on local archives and oral testimonies, and a study of the League of Intellectual Women of Thessaloniki, a feminist group which emerged in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Greece. Maria has also joined forces with three other ACT instructors, Anna Maria Konsta, Aigli Brouskou, and Serap Kayatekin, to undertake a group research project on immigrant women in the Thessaloniki area. The group plans eventually to collaborate with research institutes throughout Europe.

Serap Kayatekin is also editing a series of papers for the Cambridge Journal of Economics, including one for a special issue on the history of economic thought. She is particularly active in the Association for Heterodox Economics these days.

The author of a monograph on comparative EU and Japanese law, Anna Maria Konsta collaborates regularly in Comparative Law seminars at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is hard at work on a project on fundamental rights and European values, and plans a series of publications in this area in the near future.

Elsewhere in the IR area, Sotiris Serbos is currently preparing for publication his Ph.D. dissertation, which was on EU-Turkish relations in the 1990s. Sotiris continues to research Turkey's EU accession efforts and Greek-Turkish relations. He is preparing a paper on “Security Considerations in Contemporary EU-Turkish Relations” for a conference of the International Studies Association, to be held in Bucaco, Portugal, in June 2007.

David Wisner's current research focuses on various dimensions of US policy in post-communist Southeast Europe. He is working in particular on US participation in the spillover mission in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia under the auspices of the UN and the OSCE.

Joseph Michael Gratale is on sabbatical this semester. His research project, which will be carried out with the collaboration of former ACT sociology instructor Grigoris Paschalidis, will concern sources of Greek anti-Americanism in elementary and secondary pedagogical texts. Joseph's work will be of interest both to students of cultural studies and to practitioners of public diplomacy.

Just returned from his own sabbatical is Vincent Mueller. Perhaps our most prodigious scholar, Vincent travels every summer throughout Europe in search of academic conferences, and will be typically active this coming summer with several presentations on artifical intelligence, computational systems, and digital states. He is poised to publish a groundbreaking textbook on artificial intelligence, tentatively entitled "Artificial Intelligence: The Basic Problems."

Elsewhere in the humanities, Anna Challenger is working on an epic that is set in colonial America. She is particularly interested in seventeenth-century American literature, from the Great Migration to the Witch Trials. She has also published a book on Sufi poetry.