The Balkans, the OSS, and Western Civilization

Dr. Kyriakos Nalmpantis is Chair of the Department of History and assistant professor of European history at Baldwin Wallace University. He has a total of nineteen years teaching experience, and in addition to teaching at Baldwin Wallace, has taught at Cleveland State University, Kent State University, and at the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. His primary research focus is on wartime Greece and the Balkans, but he is also a specialist in Reformation-era Europe, contemporary European history and modern Latin American history. At Baldwin Wallace, he also teaches a course on classical antiquity that is mostly focused on ancient Greece and Rome. In 2011, his dissertation, Time on the Mountain: The Office of Strategic Services in Axis-Occupied Greece, won the Modern Greek Studies Association’s biennial Iatrides Dissertation Prize for best dissertation. He has also published short biographical articles on three important Greek Orthodox prelates — Metropolitan Germanos Karavaggelis, Archbishop Damaskinos and Archbishop Makarios — in the Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Politics (Greenwood Publishing, 2006). Dr. Nalmpantis also serves on both the National Council and the Scholarship Committee for Phi Alpha Theta, which is the National Honor Society for History.

Dr. Nalmpantis has his master’s degree and his PhD in history from Kent State University, which is where we crossed paths – I took his History of the Balkans class as an upper division undergrad when I was there at Kent State and it was one of my favorite classes in undergrad – it definitely deepened my interest in the Balkans, and his unique and captivating, really effortless classroom teaching style still stands out in my mind to this day as one that I might hopefully be able to emulate at some point!