Paris Papamichos Chronakis is a Lecturer in Modern Greek History at the University of Illinois and helped Aristotle University of Thessaloniki to become a Visual History Archive access site in Greece. His interest lies in the areas of social and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire, the Greek wars, the Eastern Mediterranean port-cities, European commons and the Jews of Greece.

Chronakis started his education at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki where he finished his BA in History in 1996. He completed his MA in Comparative History at the Essex University in 1998 and in 2011 Chronakis received his Ph.D. in Modern Greek and European History at the University of Crete.

In 2011, he was a Rothschild Foundation Europe post-doctoral teaching fellow at the University of Thessaly at the department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology.

Chronakis is also the co-founder of the Group for the Study of the History of the Jews of Greece in which he and other scholars used hundreds of Visual History Archive testimonies among other sources to develop an online, searchable, integrated database of all existing Greek-Jewish Holocaust survivors.

With the cooperation of USC Shoah Foundation’s research department, once Chronakis created the Visual History Archive, he gave a lecture about his research of Greek Jewish Holocaust survivors to staff in 2012 while he was a visiting research scholar at UCLA.

“I thought presenting this kind of work to the conference would be a great opportunity to interact with other scholars, expose it to critique and further suggestions and take it further,” Chronakis said.

His research interests include the history of the Sephardim and Greek Orthodox in the 19th and 20th centuries and the history of the Mediterranean middle classes.

Chronakis hopes to gain an introduction into the expanding field of genocide studies and the work currently being done but he is more interested in the new questions than the answers he might receive, since digital technologies are quickly becoming so vital to the study of the Holocaust.

Paris Papamichos Chronakis is also a guest editor, with Anthony Molho and Eyal Ginio, of the book  “The Jews of Salonica in the Modern Period”, a special thematic issue of Jewish History published in autumn of 2014.