Who We Are
PAST ASSOCIATES
Myria Vassiliadou, Senior Research Associate
Myria Vassiliadou has recently been appointed EU Anti-Trafficking Coordinator.
She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Sociology and Social Research and a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. She has further been a research fellow at the Solomon Asch centre for Study of Ethno-political conflict, at the University of Pennsylvania. Ms Vassiliadou has served as Secretary General of the European Women’s Lobby, the largest network of women’s associations across the EU. She was further a founding member of the think tank Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies and served as its director for seven years and subsequently as the Chair of the Board of Administation. For over a decade, Myria worked as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Nicosia and taught undergraduate and graduate classes in Sociology. Finally, Ms Vassiliadou has worked in the European Commission as a Detached National Expert in the Directorate General for Research.
She has worked extensively in the area of fundamnetal rights, as these relate to questions of gender, trafficking in human beings, migration, ethno-political conflict, and the media. She has published in several books and journals, conducted workshops and seminars, and has been actively involved in various think tanks, EU wide research projects and national/international non-governmental organisations. She has trained as a counsellor on interpersonal violence against women and also as a facilitator/mediator on conflict transformation and negotations. She has lived and worked in various countries both in Europe and beyond.
Rania Tollefson, Project and Media Coordinator
Rania Tollefson graduated with a BA in Communications from the University of Indianapolis in the USA with a minor in Graphic Design. As a student, she became increasingly interested in the creative Arts and took classes on gender. She developed a keen interest in further developing her knowledge on and contributing to these areas. Apart from her administrative duties, Rania is actively involved in dissemination and is responsible for the institute’s website. She has recently been working on developing a resource manual on trafficking and has been part of the team working on project proposals and development.
Project Involvement in: Intercultural Dialogue on Violence against Women
Eleni Skarpari, Project Administrator
Eleni Skarpari holds a BA in English Literature from Lancaster University and an MA in English Literature from Warwick University in the UK, with an area of concentration in feminist literary theory and the tensions as well as the interrelations within modernist women’s writing between art and quantum physics. For the past three years she has been a lecturer of English at the Intercollege, Nicosia campus, focusing mainly on teaching writing and western literature. She has so far published two short stories and poems in Cypriot Identities, edited by Karin B. Costello, and in “Cadences: A Journal of Literature and the Arts in Cyprus”, edited by Dr. Spurgeon Thompson. Additionally, she works as an editor for English magazine, ‘View’, published in Cyprus, dealing with diverse issues but concentrating on the Cypriot lifestyle. Her research interests include female voices and identity within the experience of urban space and French feminist theory (écriture féminine).
Project Involvement in: Integration of Female Migrant Domestic Workers
Margarita Zervidou, Research Associate
Margarita Zervidou completed her professional qualification examinations for the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (UK) in 1990 and officially earned the qualification after three years of practical experience in the field. She has been a senior lecturer at the Professional Studies Department of Intercollege for the last eight years, where she also completed her MA degree in Sociology. Her research interests include nationalism, gender and migration and also sociology of mental health.
Project Involvement in: Integration of Female Migrant Domestic Workers
