Aristide Chryssoulis
After my undergraduate degree at Panthéon-Sorbonne University, I pursued a Master’s at the École normale supérieure before completing an 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 a long 19th century. It addresses this topic 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 insular governance mechanisms and volatile insular identities within the Ottoman Aegean. My research contributes in particular to the overlooked case of the Ottoman semi-sovereign Principality of Samos and the legal conditions of its inhabitants.
My PhD, under the supervision of Dr Kate Fleet, is generously funded by a Cambridge Trust International Scholarship. I have also been lucky to receive grants from Newnham College (Moody-Stuart Scholarships in Turkish Studies), Peterhouse (Greta Burkill Fund Awards), the Faculty of History (Fieldwork and Conference Grants), and the Ecole Française d'Athènes (Bourses scientifiques) which have all generously contributed to my research. I am also a Postgraduate Researcher at the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Newnham College.
My wider research interests include the early modern and modern Mediterranean, legal pluralism in the Ottoman Empire and maritime spaces, the legal knowledge of individuals, as well as islands and insular societies.
I supervise and lecture for Part IB Paper 16: The Mediterranean World, 1450 - 1800.
I welcome any enquiries on the early modern and modern Mediterranean.
10th April 2025 - Will present a forthcoming paper at the Travellers in Ottoman Lands Conference. Istanbul, Türkiye.
16th January 2025 – Presented a paper entitled 'Gouverner l’information en contexte insulaire : le cas du feu à Samos, XIXe siècle' at the GOUVILES Seminar. University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, France.*
5th June 2024 – Presented a paper entitled ‘Insularités, mondes juridiques et la Principauté de Samos au sein de l’Egée ottomane et post-ottomane’, at the “Les sources consulaires. Pour une histoire sociale et globale des relations internationales” doctoral workshop. ‘La Fabrique Consulaire’ Research Network, Nantes.
29th May 2024 – Presented a paper entitled ‘To be Samiot within the Ottoman and Hellenic Aegean. A case of Legal and Insular Exceptionality in the 19th century’, at the “Sixth International Conference of the Mediterranean Maritime History Network (MMHN)”. Institute for Mediterranean Studies (IMS/FORTH), Rethymno.
31st March 2023 – Chaired a panel entitled ‘Communities of Exchange’, with talks by Elliott Fuller (University of Toronto) and Dr. Kalliopi Vasilaki (IMS/FORTH) at the “Encounters at Sea” Faculty of History Conference. University of Cambridge, Cambridge.*
5th April 2019 - Chaired a talk by Prof. Timothy Brook (University of British Columbia), entitled 'Scrutinizing Art for History. Johannes Vermeer and Liu Guandao' at the History Week organised by the History Department. Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL, Paris.*
*Invited.
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Key publications
- ‘Bibliographie d’Hélène Antoniadis-Bibicou’, Études Balkaniques, HS1 (2021), pp. 151–158.