Costas Canakis is Professor of Sociolinguistics and director of the Laboratory for Ethnographic Studies on Language (LESoL) and Graduate Program “Gender, Culture and Society”. After graduating with a BA in English (University of Athens 1990, summa cum laude) he earned a PhD in Linguistics as a Fulbright & Century Scholar (University of Chicago, 1995). He subsequently taught at Princeton University (1995-1997) and the Departments of English at the Universities of Athens (1998-2001) and Thessaloniki (2001-2002), before joining the University of the Aegean in 2000. His interests lie at the intersection of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and anthrolinguistics, as evidenced by his monograph An Introduction to Pragmatics: Cognitive and Social Aspects of Language Use (in Greek, 2007) and the collected volumes Language and Sexuality: (Through and) Beyond Gender (co-edited with V. Kantsa & K Yannakopoulos, 2010) and Language and Sexuality: Linguistic and Anthropological Perspectives (in Greek, 2011). His research focuses on language and society in the Balkans, notably gender, sexuality, and ethnic/national identity in linguistic landscapes.

Mentoring experience: I have organized the summer school LAGESEC; the Tuesday evening talk series on Language and Society where younger scholars are invited to present their work; I am editor of the online journal AWPE, whose special issues are edited by junior colleagues.