Aglaia Chatjouli was born in Athens in 1974. She teaches at the Department of Social Anthropology and History of the University of the Aegean since December 2019. She studied molecular cell biology at King’s College London (B.Sc. 1996), human biology at the University of Oxford (M.Sc. 1997), social anthropology at the University of the Aegean (postgraduate studies, 2002), and holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of the Aegean (2009).
Her research interests focus on anthropology of health and wellbeing, anthropology of the body, anthropology of the environment, anthropology of childhood and Greek ethnography. She carries out research on the construction of wellbeing in different contexts and on the multiple conceptualizations and shifts that are documented in the fields or reproduction, nurturing and parenting. More specifically she is interested in the relationship between biology and anthropology, in the normative power of (bio)difference, in the shifts and (dis)continuities related to the understanding of nature, in the nature/culture dichotomy, in the politics of health, in the complex relationship between the environment and wellbeing. She has carried out extensive research on thalassaemia in Greece and on infertility and new reproductive technologies.
She has taught a course on contemporary Greek society to undergraduate students from US Universities in Arcadia University Athens (2016-2017), and anthropology of health in Panteion University (2017-2018) and in the University of the Aegean. She has been invited to give lectures on anthropology of health and anthropology of the body in various universities and on her work in thalassaemia, and she has given lectures on anthropology and global health and anthropology and the right to health at the M.Sc. course “International health and health crisis management” of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens”.
During the period 2013-2015 she held a postdoc position at the university of the Aegean carrying out ethnographic research on infertility and new reproductive technologies in Greece alongside the project (In)FERCIT, “(In)Fertile Citizens: On the Concepts, Practices, Politics and Technologies of Assisted Reproduction in Greece”, co-funded by the European Union and Greek national funds.) http://www.in-fercit.gr/en). She has worked for the Hellenic Open University in order to construct a “Culturally sensitive Mental Health Guide for Refugees” in the context of the Project “PRESS: Provision of Refugee Education and Support” (2017). During the periods 1997-1998 and 1998-2002 she held research positions at the Hellenic Research Foundation and participated in the European research projects: “Biotechnology and the European Public” and “European Debates in Biotechnology & Life Sciences in European Society”. During an internship at the “Department of Reproductive Health and Research” of the WHO in Geneva, in 2010, she carried out desk research on the topic of “Infertility and Stigma in Indigenous Populations”. During the period 2011-2012 she participated in the Project “Cross-cultural mediation in selected hospitals in Athens and Thessalonica” funded by the European Fund for the Inclusionof Third-country Nationals”.