The 29^TH MGSA SYMPOSIUM

The Edmund Keeley Book Prize for 2026

It is with great pleasure that the Keeley Book Prize Committee announces a joint award to Kostis Kornetis for A Collective Biography of Southern European Democratization: The Age of Transitions (Oxford University Press, 2026) and William Stroebel for Literature’s Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape (Princeton University Press, 2025). The Committee has also selected Emily Neumeier to receive an honorable mention for Architectural Revolution on the Ottoman Frontier (Penn State University Press, 2025). This year saw an unprecedented number of submissions, with the Committee reviewing twenty books of exceptional quality. Collectively, these works signal the emergence of new directions in the field and will undoubtedly shape its future for years to come.

Kostis Kornetis’s A Collective Biography of Southern European Democratization: The Age of Transitions is a work of extraordinary ambition and reach. It is the first study to place the Greek Metapolitefsi alongside the Portuguese Carnation Revolution and the Spanish Transición through the memories of those who experienced these transformative events.

Drawing on years of oral history research conducted in Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese, Kornetis organizes his account by political generation rather than by nation. He identifies three generations: those who came of age during the transitions themselves; those who witnessed them vividly as children without fully understanding them; and those born into the democracies that followed, whose relationship to 1974 he conceptualizes as “projective memory,” one of several important contributions the book makes to memory studies.

Moving with equal assurance between torture testimonies and Saturday-morning cartoons, memorial parks and popular songs, Kornetis demonstrates how memories of democratic transition became potent instruments in the political struggles that followed the Great Recession. This is comparative history of the highest order: intellectually ambitious, deeply humane, and consistently attentive to what democracies choose to remember and what they agree to forget.

William Stroebel’s Literature’s Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape offers a pathbreaking account of Greek and Turkish refugee and diasporic literature in the era when modern borders in the Eastern Mediterranean were redrawn and populations were forcibly displaced from their ancestral homes. Stroebel synthesizes insights from book history, philology, and world literature into a powerful theoretical framework that enables nuanced readings across an impressive range of texts and contexts: a seventeenth-century work of Greek Islam written in Arabic script, twentieth-century handwritten and handmade codices of Agathangelos in Karamanli Turkish, contemporary Turkish Cypriot fiction, the publishing networks in which C. P. Cavafy participated, and testimonial literature of the Population Exchange.

Through these readings, Stroebel reconstructs and recovers archives and works that have slipped through the cracks of national philologies while also illuminating overlooked dimensions of the production, circulation, and reception of canonical texts. In both scope and achievement, Literature’s Refuge constitutes an exceptionally original and compelling model for reading literature in Greek and Turkish from a transnational perspective, positioning it at the forefront of contemporary debates in world literature and literary studies.

Emily Neumeier’s Architectural Revolution on the Ottoman Frontier revisits the region governed by the so-called Lion of Ioannina, Ali Pasha. A tour de force of historical and architectural analysis, the book fundamentally reshapes our understanding of center-periphery relations by demonstrating how borderlands often served not as passive recipients of change but as dynamic sites of innovation and influence.

Focusing on the architectural projects and building campaigns that transformed the region, Neumeier offers far more than a study of architecture. She provides a richly textured historical and cultural assessment of Ali Pasha’s power, influence, and political vision. In her account, the Pashalik of Ioannina emerges as a vibrant hub that attracted intellectuals, diplomats, merchants, and travelers from across the region. At the same time, the architectural style cultivated under Ali Pasha became a powerful vehicle for expressing and shaping regional identity.

As Neumeier argues, this ambitious building program was “so revolutionary, it ultimately got him killed.” Elegantly written and beautifully illustrated, Architectural Revolution on the Ottoman Frontier transforms our understanding of Ottoman politics, architecture, and the relationship between centers and peripheries.

The Committee extends its warmest congratulations to this year’s awardees and honorable mention recipient. Collectively, these works exemplify the intellectual rigor, methodological innovation, and interdisciplinary breadth that define the Keeley Book Prize. The Committee also thanks all of the authors whose books were submitted for consideration. Their outstanding scholarship attests to the vitality, creativity, and continued growth of the field of Greek Studies.

The Edmund Keeley Prize comes with an award of $2,000, which will be shared between the two winners. The award will be presented at the Award Ceremony at the 29^th MGSA Symposium, at the University of Illinois Chicago, on Thursday, October 15^th, 2026.

The Edmund Keeley Book Prize is awarded to an academic book dealing with modern Greece or a Hellenic theme published originally in the English language. Through this award the Modern Greek Studies Association celebrates the contributions of Professor Edmund Keeley, who served as the first president of our association, authored or translated over 30 books, taught Hellenic Studies for 40 years, and was a mentor and a source of inspiration for generations of scholars. 

-The 2026 Keeley Book Prize Committee:

• Katerina Lagos (Chair, California State University, Sacramento)
• Othon Alexandrakis (York University, Toronto)
• Simos Zenios (Stony Brook University, SUNY)