Anagnostou, Yiorgos. “Rethinking Greek American Scholarships: Hellenism Beyond Ethnicity.” American Journal of Contemporary Hellenic Issues, vol. 10, Spring 2019.
Greek America is, relatively speaking, a small demographic in the United States. The professional priorities of its youth are well established. Statistically, the majority of Greek American students gravitate toward law, medical sciences, engineering, business, and other non-humanities professions. We do honor, rightly, distinguished scientists, such as George Papanikolaou, for their contributions to society. But the number of professionals that might explore and explain Modern Greek heritage to us and the wider American public is not as robust as we would like. It is a fact that the work of journalists, artists, filmmakers, fiction writers, folklorists, anthropologists, historians, and political scientists is crucial for enriching Greek self-understanding as well as for maximizing Greek cultural visibility everywhere. High-quality journalism, scholarship, and the arts offer venues of self-reflection for Greek Americans as well as the means to explain ourselves and the community’s issues to the American people and beyond. High caliber art and scholarship about Modern Greek worlds, both in Greece and abroad, constitute the community’s “soft power” to profoundly stir emotions, engage with ideas, move the imagination, and steer the cultural direction of the nation. They decisively define Greek Americans as a group that contributes to the intellectual life of the country.