We are pleased to announce the Dimitrios Sparis is a recipient of a 2026 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
This prestigious award will support Dimitrios' dissertation project, "Polis Without a Place: The Moral Economy of Exile in the Ancient Greek World," which he will be working on next year at the University of Cambridge.
"Polis Without a Place" is a household-centered economic history of ancient Greek displacement from the 4th to the 2nd centuries BCE. It advances a moral-economic interpretation of displacement, viewing exile, driven by civic conflict and imperial rivalry, as a stress test for Greek ideas of justice and welfare, and for the adaptive choices of households negotiating power and precarity from the ground up. Methodologically, it moves from hundreds of exilic episodes, known from inscriptions, oratory, ancient historical texts, and site histories, to macro estimates and diachronic patterns across the Aegean, Sicily, and the eastern Mediterranean. A purpose-built digital database supports scale estimates, geospatial analyses, and targeted investigations into confiscation, relief, inequality, gendered labor, and household autonomy.
You can read more about the fellowship and the other awardees here.
Congratulations, Dimitrios!