Katherine Elizabeth Fleming

K. E. (Katherine Elizabeth) Fleming is the Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture and Civilization in the Department of History at New York University. In Spring 2016, she was announced as NYU's next Provost, and she assumed office on September 1, 2016. She specializes in the modern history of Greece and the broader Mediterranean context, with a particular focus on religious minorities.

Fleming is also a senior member of the administration of New York University.^[1] and is the second director (after Tony R. Judt) of the Remarque Institute.^[2] Fleming was associate director of the institute from 2002 until Judt's death in 2010. She was appointed Provost of NYU in April 2016 to begin in Fall 2016.

In addition to her appointments at NYU, Fleming is a permanent associate member of the faculty of the department of history of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she runs a longstanding workshop on the history of the Mediterranean with the French historian of Italy, Gilles Pécout.^[3] Fleming has been in residence at the École Normale since 2007, although she retains her positions at NYU.^[4] Fleming has sat on the boards of numerous journals, among them the American Historical Review. Fleming is also President of the board of Piraeus University in Greece.^[5]

Family

Fleming is the daughter of the American literary critic John V. Fleming and of the British-born Joan E. Fleming, a prominent priest in the Episcopal diocese of New Jersey and Rector Emerita of Christ Church parish, New Brunswick.^[6]

Fleming has two brothers, Richard Arthur Fleming, a travel writer; and Luke Owles Fleming, a linguistic anthropologist. She is the mother of three daughters.

Education

Fleming holds a certificate in Theology from King's College London (1985), and earned a BA in religion from Barnard College (1988), an MA in religion from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago (1989), and a PhD in History (1995) from the University of California, Berkeley^[7]

Publications

Fleming's first book, The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy & Orientalism in Ali Pasha's Greece (Princeton, 1999), was not widely reviewed and received little attention in the USA at the time of its publication, but has gone on to be a standard of doctoral reading lists in cultural history and in the history of southeastern Europe, and has been translated into Albanian, Greek, Italian, and Turkish.^[8][9] In Greece, the Greek edition was widely reviewed and received coverage in the popular press.

Fleming's second book, Greece—A Jewish History (Princeton, 2008), has received numerous awards: the National Jewish Book Award; Runciman Award; Prix Alberto Benveniste; honorable mention, Keeley Book Prize of the Modern Greek Studies Association^[10] and received considerable popular press in Greece. It has been translated into Greek and French.^[11] In the English-speaking academy the book has been widely and largely positively reviewed, though some reviewers have objected to its "diasporist" approach, which minimizes and to an extent rejects the centrality of Israel and of Zionism.

Reviews:

• 2010. Robert Bonfil, "Memories, Identities, Histories," Jewish Quarterly Review, 100:4.
• 2011. Andrew Apostolou, "When did the Jews of Greece Become Greek?" Yad Vashem Studies 38[2].

The book has appeared in both Greek and French editions.^[11]

Fleming is co-editor, with Adnan Husain, of A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean 1200--1700 (Oxford OneWorld, 2007). Fleming is also author of numerous articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries, of which the most oft-cited is "Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography", published in the American Historical Review in 2000.

In 2009, the journal Nationalities Papers printed an apology and retraction after it was found that an article published in its pages had made extensive use of Fleming's article without citation or reference ( Alice Curticapean, "Are you Hungarian or Romanian?" in Nationalities Papers, Volume 35, No. 3, pp. 411–427; retraction printed Volume 37, No. 4.)

Fleming is a prolific book reviewer, and has published close to one hundred reviews in both academic and popular publications.

References