Katherine Elizabeth Fleming

Katherine Elizabeth Fleming is the Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture and Civilization in the Department of History at New York University (NYU). She has been Provost of NYU since 2016.

Fleming holds a certificate in Theology from King's College London (1985). She 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

In Spring 2016, she was announced as NYU's next Provost, and assumed office on September 1, 2016. She specializes in the modern history of Greece and the broader Mediterranean, with a particular focus on religious minorities.

Fleming was the second director (after Tony R. Judt) of the Remarque Institute. Fleming was associate director of the institute from 2002 until Judt's death in 2010.

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.

Fleming was in residence at the École Normale from 2007 to 2011, although she retained her positions at NYU.

Fleming is the co-founder and co-director (with Sofia Papaioannou) of "Istorima," a large-scale oral history/public humanities project funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

Fleming has sat on the boards of numerous journals, among them the American Historical Review. Fleming was President of the board of the University of Piraeus in Piraeus, Greece from 2012 to 2016.She sits on the Board of Directors of Advent Technologies, a fuel cell company founded in Patras, Greece.

Honors

In 2016, the government of Greece recognized her contributions to Greek culture by granting her honorary Greek citizenship.

In 2017, the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki) awarded her an honorary doctorate in recognition of outstanding scholarship and contributions to the study of Greek history.

In 2018, Ionian University (Corfu) awarded her an honorary doctorate in recognition of outstanding contributions to Greece and the study of Greece.

In 2019, Fleming was named to the French Légion d'Honneur, but, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has indefinitely delayed the formal "remise" of the award.

In 2021, Fleming was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Books

Fleming's first book, The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy & Orientalism in Ali Pasha's Greece (Princeton, 1999), was not widely reviewed in the US 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. 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: a National Jewish Book Award; the Runciman Award; the Prix Alberto Benveniste; and an honorable mention, Keeley Book Prize of the Modern Greek Studies Association and received considerable popular press in Greece.It has been translated into Greek and French. In the English-speaking academy the book has been widely and largely positively reviewed, though some reviewers have objected to its "anti-Zionist" and "diasporist" approach, which minimizes and to an extent rejects the centrality of Israel and of Zionism.

The book has appeared in both Greek and French editions.

Fleming is co-editor, with Adnan Husain, of A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean 1200--1700 (Oxford OneWorld, 2007).

Other publications

Fleming has also authored numerous articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries, of which the most 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.

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.

She has two brothers, Richard Arthur Fleming, a travel writer; and Luke Owles Fleming, a linguistic anthropologist.

She is the mother of three daughters.