Thomas W. Gallant holds the Nicholas Family Endowed Chair in Modern Greek History and is Professor of Modern Greek History and Archaeology in the History Department at the University of California, San Diego, where he is also co-director of the university’s Center for Hellenic Studies. He received his PhD in Classical Archaeology from the University of Cambridge. Before taking up the chair at UC San Diego, he held the Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair of Modern Greek History at York University in Toronto. Before that he was Professor of Greek History and Archaeology at the University of Florida. In addition to these academic appointments, he is a past president of the Modern Greek Studies Association, president and executive officer of the the Canadian Institute for Balkan Studies and president of the Canadian Hellenic Historical Society. He is the author of nine books and over 40 articles; among his books are Modern Greece (2001), the prize-winning Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity and Power in the British Mediterranean (2002), and August Burning: The 1918 Anti-Greek Riot in Toronto (2008), which was made into an award-winning documentary film. His most recently published or forthcoming books are The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1768-1913: The Long Nineteenth Century (2015), Η εμπερεία της αποικιακής κυριαρχίας. Πολιτισμός, ταυτότητα και εξουσία στα Επτάνησα, 1817-1864 (2015), Murder on Black Mountain: Love and Death on a Nineteenth Century Greek Island (2016) and Modern Greece from Independence to the Present (2016).  In progress are Σύγχρονη Ελλάδα. Μια κοινωνική και πολιτική ιστορία (2016), Athens: A Social History (2018) and Europe’s First Modern War: The Greek-Ottoman War of 1897 (2017). He is currently editor-in-chief of the ten-volume Edinburgh History of the Greeks, Social Science editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies and director of KASHAP: the Kefalonia and Andros Social History and Archaeology Project.

The brutal murder of English Captain John Parker on the Greek island of Kefalonia in May 1849 created a cause célèbre in mid-nineteenth century Europe. Using documents from archives in Greece and Great Britain, the lecture explores the contours of social life in nineteenth century Greece.