Plakotos Giorgos

Associate Professor

Academic field: Cultural and Social History of Early Modern Western Europe

Official Government Gazette, Issue: 1068/07.04.2024 τ. Γ΄

Giorgos Plakotos studied History at the University of Athens. He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow with a thesis on The Venetian Inquisition and Aspects of ‘Otherness’: Judaizers, Muslim and Christian Converts (16th-17th century), (2005). His research received funding from the University of Glasgow and the Royal Historical Society.

He has been teaching in the Department of Social Anthropology and History since 2008. He has taught at the University of Athens and the University of the Peloponnese. He is also teaching at the Hellenic Open University.

His articles have been published in English, Italian, French and Greek journals and edited volumes. He has co-authored History of Venice and the Venetian Empire, 11th-18th century: Society, Economy, Culture (Athens, 2015) [in Greek] and co-edited Masculinities: Representations, Subjectivities and Practices from Medieval to Modern Times (Athens, 2019) [in Greek].

He has conducted extensive research in Italian archives (notably the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Archivio della Curia Patriarcale) and libraries in Italy and the UK. An important strand of his work has focused on the Inquisition, conversion, crypto-Judaism and crypto-Islamic practices, and gender in Renaissance and post-Tridentine Italy. More recently he has broaden his research interests to include the formation of early modern “ethnographic” discourse, taxonomies, categories of knowledge and the emergence of early modern globality.

He is a member of the Cultural and Intellectual History Society (CIHIS-Athens). He is also a member of the Greek Committee of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History. He serves on the editorial committee of the journal Historein: A Review of the Past and Other Stories.

Books

2023 Gender and Sexual Relations in Europe (12th-18th century): Ideals, Practices, Representations, Athens, Kallipos, Open Academic Editions [in Greek]. Available at: https://dx.doi.org/10.57713/kallipos-198

2023 (co-edited with R. Benveniste and A. Dialeti), The Local, the Global and the Transnational in European History: Mobilities, Encounters and Hierarchies, Athens, Themelio [in Greek]. (forthcoming)

2019 (co-edited with D. Vasiliadou, Y. Yannitsiotis, A. Dialeti), Masculinities: Representations, Subjectivities and Practices from Medieval to Modern Times, Athens, Gutenberg [in Greek].

2015 (co-authored with A. Dialeti and A. Poupou), History of Venice and the Venetian Empire, 11th-18th century: Society, Economy, Culture [e-book], Athens, Hellenic Academic Libraries Link [in Greek].
Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/11419/1854


Articles

2023 “Centre-Periphery and the Global Early Modern: Some Historiographical Reflections”, Historein, 21.2 (forthcoming).

2022 “Population, Urban Space and the Rhetoric of Crisis: Venice and London (15th-18th century)”, in C. Gaganakis, Nikoletta Giantsi-Meletiadi, et al. (ed), European Cities in Crisis. From the Middle Ages to the Present, Athens, Herodotos: 247-270 [in Greek].

2020 “’La nouvelle Cythère’: Premodern Sex, Colonial Expansion and the Politics of Interpretation” in D. Vasiliadou and G. Gotsi (ed), Histories of Sexuality, Athens, Themelio: 318-336 [in Greek].

2019 “Reading Inquisition Documents from the Perspective of Cultural History: Some Venetian Examples”, in Gerassimos D. Pagratis (ed.), Le fonti della storia dell’Italia preunitaria: casi di studio per la loro analisi e “valorizzazione”, Athens, Papazissis Publishers: 625-650.

2019 (with D. Vasiliadou, Y. Yannitsiotis, A. Dialeti), “Masculinities and History: A Historiographical Review”, in D. Vasiliadou, Y. Yannitsiotis, A. Dialeti, G. Plakotos (ed.), Masculinities: Representations, Subjectivities and Practices from Medieval to Modern Times, Athens, Gutenberg: 11-101 [in Greek].

2019 “Under the Others’ Gaze: Masculinity and Travel, 13th-18th centuries”, in D. Vasiliadou, Y. Yannitsiotis, A. Dialeti, G. Plakotos (ed.), Masculinities: Representations, Subjectivities and Practices from Medieval to Modern Times, Athens, Gutenberg: 383-410 [in Greek].

2018 “Interrogating Conversion: Discourses and Practices in the Venetian Inquisition (16th-17th Centuries)”, in Katherine Aron-Beller and Christopher F. Black (ed.), The Roman Inquisition: Centre versus Peripheries, Leiden, Brill: 268-300.

2018 “The Reformation and the Dawn of Modernity? Reviving the Past, Utopia and Heterotopia in Reform Movements”, in S. Zoumboulakis (ed.) Luther and the Reformation, Athens: 77-109 [in Greek].

2017 (with H. Benveniste) “Converting Bodies, Embodying Conversion: The Production of Religious Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe”, in Yaniv Fox and Yosi Yisraeli (ed.), Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World, London and New York, Routledge: 245-267.

2016 “Diasporas, Space and Imperial Subjecthood in Early Modern Venice: A Comparative Perspective”, Diasporas. Circulations, migrations, histoire, 28. Special Issue: Anouche Kunth and Marie-Carmen Smyrnelis (ed.), Scènes urbaines: Èchelles, temporalités, trajectoires: 37-53. Available at: https://diasporas.revues.org/540

2015 (with A. Dialeti) “Gender, Space and the Production of Difference in Early Modern Venice”, Genesis. Rivista della Società Italiana delle Storiche, 14.2, Special Issue: Anna Badino, Ida Fazio and Fiorella Imprenti (ed.), Attraverso le città: 33-58.

2014 “Islam, Gender and Hierarchies in English Renaissance Drama: Revisiting the Sherley Brothers’ ‘Exploits’”, Ta istorika / Historica, 60: 125-164 [in Greek].

2010 “La mise au ban ‘interne’ de l’autre: les perceptions du crypto-judaïsme et l’Inquisition à Venise à la Renaissance”, in Yan Brailowsky and Pascale Drouet (ed.), Le bannissement et l’exil en Europe aux XVIe et XVIIe siècle, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes: 31-42.

2009 “Rumours, Gossip and Crypto-Jewish Identity in the Sixteenth-Century Venetian Inquisition”, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, s. 5th, 1/2, Special issue: Inquisizioni: 425-443.

2007 “Deviance, Conformity and Gender in the Venetian Inquisition (16th-17th century)”, Ta istorika / Historica, 46: 89-128 [in Greek].

2005 “Christian and Muslim Converts from the Balkans in Early Modern Venice: Patterns of Social and Cultural Mobility and Identities”, in Raymond Detrez and Pieter Plas (ed.), Developing Cultural Identity in the Balkans: Convergence vs. Divergence, Brussels, P.I.E.-Peter Lang: 125-145.


Book Reviews

2021 Benjamin G. Kohl, Andrea Mozzato, Monique O’Connell, The Rulers of Venice, 1332–1524. (Database rulersofvenice.org) American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), New York, 2013. Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 44.1: 157-160 & Early Modern Digital Review, 4.1.

2017 Rotem Kowner, From White to Yellow: The Japanese in European Racial Thought, 1300-1735, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2014. The Sixteenth Century Journal, 48.2: 531-533.

2015 Jo Ann Cavallo, The World beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2013. The Sixteenth Century Journal, 46.3: 818-820.

2014 Pierre Birnbaum, A Tale of Ritual Murder in the Age of Louis XIV: The Trial of Raphaël Lévy, 1669, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2012. Historein: A Review of the Past and Other Stories, 14.2:133-136.

2014 Jerry Toner, Homer’s Turk: How Classics Shaped Ideas of the East, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2013. Canadian Journal of History/ Annales Canadiennes d’Histoire, 49.1:168-170.

2010 Jeffrey Watt, The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent, University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY, 2009. Canadian Journal of History / Annales Canadiennes d’Histoire, 45.2: 365-367.

Contact

Undergraduate Courses

H-247 Europe, Empires and Globality in the Early Modern Period
special background, specialised general knowledge
H-238 Gender and Sex in Premodern Europe
special background
H-218 Social and Cultural History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe
special background, specialised general knowledge

Graduate Courses

CHC-10 Tolerance, Persecution and Otherness in Europe, 15th-18th centuries
MA in Crisis and Historical Change

Courses taught

H-222 Tolerance, Persecution and Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (elective course)
H-224 Economy and Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (elective course)
H-225 Urban Europe in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (elective course)
W/S-031 The Inquisition in Europe and the New World (15th-18th c.) (elective seminar)
W/S-038 Rebellion and Revolution in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (elective seminar)
W/S-041 Crime and Punishment in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (elective seminar)
W/S-068 Historians and Historiography of Medieval and Early Modern Europe (elective seminar)

Undergraduate

H-238 Gender and Sex in Premodern Europe
special background
H-218 Social and Cultural History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe
special background, specialised general knowledge

Postgraduate Courses

CHC-10 Tolerance, Persecution and Otherness in Europe, 15th-18th centuries
Plakotos Giorgos