Yanoula Athanassakis received her Ph.D. in English (American Literature), with a Global Studies emphasis, from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her interests include the politics of environmental justice, representations of immigration and the body in contemporary U.S. multi-ethnic literatures, global and transnational approaches to “American” texts, and theories of corporeality. Her book project dovetails with the transnational turn in American Studies and with emerging concerns of environmental justice. In her roles as Managing Editor for Special Forums for The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) and as Co-director of the UC Summer Study Abroad to Greece Program she works to keep her teaching and research relevant to an international audience. Her publications include poetry translations from English to demotic Greek of both more traditional and experimental, digital projects. She has published articles on psychosomatic trauma in U.S. literature, the intersection of postcolonial politics and transnational studies in the writing of Kiran Desai, and on filmic and literary representations of human rights violations on the U.S.-Mexico border.