Kravva Vasiliki

Vasiliki Kravva studied History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. In 1994 she studied for six months (national scholarship, ERASMUS programme) at the University of Cagliari, Italy, dept. of cultural anthropology. She completed an MA (Master of Arts) and a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) on Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her thesis is concerned with issues of food and identity among the Jews of Thessaloniki. Dr. Kravva has participated in a number of conferences and seminars in Greece and Europe and has published on issues of food, eating, consuming and identity, food entitlement, embodied memory, religious performativity, oral histories and minority issues, the Holocaust, Literature and Camp Memoirs. She has taught “Social Anthropology” at the University of London, “Food and Anthropology” and “Political Anthropology” at several Greek Universities and she has been a lecturing (2012-13 and until now) at the Greek Open University. For several years she had been teaching “Principles of Sociology” at the LSE external programme in Thessaloniki. Dr. Kravva had been teaching Greek to immigrants living in Thessaloniki. This project was co-organized by IDEKE (National Organization for the Continuous Education of Adults) and the European Union. For two years (2005-7) she had been a researcher working for the CENTROPA research project (oral history project) which is concerned with the pre-War and post-War lives of European and especially Balkan Jews. This “digital memory” project can be found on the internet site of CENTROPA. Dr. Kravva as an active member of the Academic network “Border Crossings” has co-organized a number of student conferences throughout the Balkans (eg. Plovdif, Zadar, Istanbul, Bucharest, Belgrade, Velico-Turnovo etc.) and has been teaching (since 2006) at the Konitsa summer school. She has reviewed several articles for the Journal of Anthropology and Sociology, Ethnologia Balkanica, Folklore and SAGEopen and Pasithei. Recent scientific interests: consumption, urban poverty, social care and homelessness, mental health and illness. Since 2011 she has been teaching anthropology (since 2022 appointed as an Associate Professor) at Democritus University of Thrace, Greece, Department Humanistic Studies (former dept. of History and Ethnology). Selected publications:
Kravva V, 2010, Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you if you are Jewish. Food and discourses of identity among Thessalonikan Jews, VDM Verlag, Germany
Kravva V. Consuming culture: stories on food and deprivation (in Greek), 2020, Athens: Patakis
M. Spyridakis & V. Kravva (eds), Trajectories of Precarity: Ethnographic Reflections, 2021, Athens: Gutenberg. Her next monograph titled The Consumption of Welfare State and the Housing of Homelessness. Ethnographic Research of the Urban Other is to be published within 2026. Since October 2025 she has been teaching at the postgraduate program: “Cultural Studies: Modern Greek and Balkan Identities” and she is also a member of the advisory board. Dr Kravva has given a number of online lectures at Indiana University and Michigan University. She has been invited as a research scholar to
research and teach at Indiana University (Ostrom program) in September 2006. She has a rich administrative and research work at Democritus University of Thrace as an active member of several committees, for example the Organization for Gender Equality and Fighting Inequalities, the Organization for Ongoing Education and Life Long Learning, and she is the coordinator of the Students’ Practical Training in her department. Dr Kravva is a member of the UNESCO-led network for the study of the Cultural Heritage of South-East Europe. She also participates as a research partner in a European research project CERV in which institutions, universities and museums from Finland, Spain, Greece, Italy and Albania participate.