Stavroula Pipyrou is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and Founding Director of the Centre for Minorities Research. She has conducted long-term ethnographic research with minorities in Italy since 2006. In her first monograph “The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Minority Politics” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) she presents a theory of “Fearless Governance” – overlapping and sometimes contradictory systems of power, authority, and relational networks that enable the minority to achieve political representation at the intersection of local, national, and global encounters. Her second monograph "Lurking Cold War: Life Through Historical Communion" (Berghahn, 2025) considers the continued affects of the Cold War on material, aesthetic, and intergenerational relations in Italy and Greece.

Her Leverhulme project (2014-17), “An Intergenerational Analysis of Forced Child-relocation in Italy”, looked at the silenced stories of displacement in Cold War (1950s) South Italy shedding light on a hitherto overlooked historico-political period of turmoil. Child displacement is directly associated with historical macro-silences and the lack of systematic ethnological studies on the events that took place during the Cold War period in Italy. Violent displacements that remained silenced in the post-Cold War years have shaped contemporary European politics in a profound manner.

Stavroula is currently writing on Cold War legacies in Italy and Greece. She has also conducted research in Brazil and Scotland on minority access to education. She is a Royal Society of Edinburgh, Young Academy of Scotland Fellow 2022-27 and Founding Editor of the interdisciplinary Routledge Advances in Minority Studies series, in which she has co-edited a volume "Minorities, Scarcity and Conflict" (Routledge, 2025).

Centre for Minorities Research (CMR). A unique initiative that brings together interdisciplinary expertise from an outstanding pool of staff from across seven Schools at the University of St Andrews. Centre members are committed to exploring intersectionality in the ‘everyday lives’ of minorities, both in Scotland and internationally. Promoting equality, diversity and inclusion in the University and wider community is central to all our activities. The CMR arranges public talks, holds networking events, organises outreach activities, collaborates on funding applications and policy-oriented research. Contact Stavroula Pipyrou for more information.

Research Interests / Supervision Topics: Political Anthropology, Minorities, Displacement, Equality and Diversity, Children, Governance, Civil Society, Violence and Crime, Cold War, Silence, Performance and Dance, Death, Italy, Greece, Brazil, Turkey

Books Authored:

Pipyrou, S. 2025. Lurking Cold War: Life Through Historical Communion. New York/Oxford: Berghahn.

Montañés Jiménez, A., Ferreira Marinelli, C. and S. Pipyrou. (eds). 2025. Minorities, Scarcity and Conflict. London: Routledge.

Pipyrou, S. 2016. The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Minority Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Edited Collections:

Bond, E. and Pipyrou, S. (eds.). 2023. Futures in Post-Displacement Italy. Journal of Modern Italian Studies 28(4)

Pipyrou, S. and A. Sorge. (eds.). 2021. Emergent Axioms of Violence. Anthropological Forum 31(3)

Pipyrou, S. (ed.). 2018. #MeToo is little more than mob rule // vs // #MeToo is a legitimate form of social justice. Special section of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8(3)

Projects:

2019-20: ODA Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) "Capturing new education models among indigenous and quilombla minorities in Brazil".

2017-19: Gender Diversity and Inclusion (GDI) grant for the project ‘International Minority Education: Opening New Collaborative Research Possibilities’ for best-practice knowledge exchange between the University of St Andrews and Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil).

2014-17: Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, “An intergenerational analysis of forced child-relocation in Italy”.

2015-17: ESRC Urgency Grant, “Transitory Lives: An Anthropological Research of the Migration Crisis in the Mediterranean”.

2015-16: British Academy (British School of Athens) and Ecole française d’Athènes “Trust” seminar and research project (with Maria Couroucli and Daniel M. Knight).

2013-14: Carnegie Trust Grant "Art and Energy: Understanding Attitudes to Renewables in Scotland".

Political Anthropology, Minorities, Displacement, Equality and Diversity, Children, Governance, Civil Society, Violence and Crime, Cold War, Silence, Performance and Dance, Death, Italy, Greece, Brazil, Turkey

Political Anthropology, Minorities, Displacement, Equality and Diversity, Children, Governance, Civil Society, Violence and Crime, Cold War, Silence, Performance and Dance, Death, Italy, Greece, Brazil, Turkey