I feel very privileged to co-lead the fantastic ECLIPSE team. I am Professor of Medical Anthropology and Social Sciences at the Kent and Medway Medical School.
I received my PhD in Comparative Sciences of Cultures, based on an anthropological study among Cypriot refugees and the effects of ethnic conflict, in March 2010. I started my academic career with a postdoctoral lectureship at Ghent University in Belgium (2010-12), then moved to the UK where I first worked as Research Fellow at the Hull York Medical School (2012-14) before taking up a permanent position as Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Hull (2014-16). I joined Keele’s School of Medicine as Senior Lecturer in July 2016 and was promoted to Professor in December 2019. Since January 2022 I have been working at the Kent and Medway Medical School.
I was born in Menen, a small town on the Belgian-French border, to a Greek Cypriot father and a Flemish mother. I grew up in the 1980s as a bookish girl, either quietly reading or talking too much and too fast. Not much has changed on that front! By the time I was 18 two books of my poems were out with a Flemish publisher. A literary sensation that only lasted the length of the launch and press conference. The pages of the unsold copies were later used by my siblings to write shopping lists on.
While I studied at the Universities of Leuven and Ghent, both in Belgium, I worked in a flower shop, a bakery and a chip shop (after all, this was in Belgium) and taught in different secondary schools. I hold undergraduate degrees in Education and in Art History and Archaeology and a Master’s and PhD Degree in Comparative Sciences of Cultures (this is a sociology and social anthropology degree). During my years at university, I wrote and performed, with my sister Elena Dikomitis, a theatre play about the war-torn lives of our grandmothers. We continued to collaborate on socio-artistic projects and that was perhaps more of a success than my poetry books. This collaboration certainly planted the seed to bring the arts and humanities into my scholarly work. I am the Principal Investigator of SOLACE, a GCRF AHRC-MRC funded project that combines ethnographic and creative methodologies to explore rural healthcare in the Philippines.
There is a standing joke in my family that I started my academic career working on my father’s predicament and that I then switched to my mother’s side of the story. There is some truth in that. I grew up with a certain sensitivity for mental health issues because my mother has worked, since the early 1970s, in the same Flemish psychiatric hospital. When I completed my fieldwork and book on Cyprus I ventured into medical anthropology and conducted ethnographic fieldwork in that very same hospital. Since then I am hooked on exploring socio-cultural aspects of health and illness, both in the UK and elsewhere, preferably using ethnographic and creative methods.
More info about my research can be found here and here.