Religions of ancient and Hellenistic Greece, sociology of private and public religiosity, and theories of the self.

Email: vtouna@as.ua.edu
Office Phone: 348-7223
Office: 315 Manly Hall

Vaia Touna is an Instructor for the 2010 Spring semester. She will be teaching REL 105 and co-teaching REL 100 and REL 480 with Prof. Russell McCutcheon. She will also be teaching courses in Modern Greek language through the Critical Languages Center.

She first came to the University of Alabama in May 2009, as part of REL's annual study abroad trip to Greece, organized by Prof. Russell McCutcheon. During her one week stay she taught four classes to the students who enrolled for the 2009 trip. Ms. Touna acted as the local coordinator for the 2008 trip also, and is scheduled to play the same role in 2010.

Ms. Touna was trained at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki where she earned her B.A. in the study of religion and received her MA in 2008. She is currently an ABD ("All But Dissertation") doctoral student at the Aristotle University.

Although Greek is her first language, she is also fluent in English, French, and Italian, as well as working in ancient Greek source materials.

Research Interests

Her scholarly interests in Religion in Society range widely, from looking at specific concepts from the Classical and Hellenistic eras to methodological issues concerning the study of religion in general. In her M.A. thesis, entitled  "Meden Agan: The Tragedy of Man in Euripides' Hippolytus" (Greek: Meden Agan = "nothing in excess"), she investigated the key notion of moderation and how the discourse on the virtues of living a moderate life forms specific selves in the play, which in turn inform specific relationships among humans and between mortals and the gods.

Her current doctoral research carries this earlier work forward considerably, focusing in much more detail on the social, political, military, and economic conditions that influenced the ancient idea of the self, examining how changing conditions in the early Hellenistic period made possible differing identities and thus new possibilities for social life.

She has also translated Prof. McCutcheon's Studying Religion: An Introduction into Greek, and anticipates it soon being published in Greece.