Aristide Chryssoulis

After my undergraduate degree at Panthéon-Sorbonne University, I pursued a Master’s at the École normale supérieure before completing a MPhil at Cambridge. Whereas my first Master’s thesis examined the French consular system in the Aegean Sea and islands in the late 17th century, my second prolonged this topic by way of a comparison with the English consuls.

My doctoral research attempts a social and legal history of the Aegean over the 18th and 19th centuries, thus bridging two chronologies that were usually kept separate in Greek and Ottoman historiographies. At the same time, I argue for a perspective from the islanders’ quotidian experiences, as they adapted to changes in and to different jurisdictions across a connected maritime space. Those experiences and legal knowledge offer entry points into different ways of conceptualizing provincialism in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Aegean, with a particular interest in insular semi-autonomies polities such as the Principality of Samos.

My PhD, under the supervision of Dr Kate Fleet, is generously funded by a Cambridge Trust International Scholarship. I am also a Postgraduate Researcher at the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Newnham College.