Biography
Despoina Anagnostopoulou is Professor of European Union Law and Policies in the Department of International and European Studies at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece, and Director of the UNESCO Chair of Intercultural Policy for Active Citizenship and Solidarity. In this capacity, she is a member of the UNITWIN Network on Interreligious Dialogue and a founding member of the Global Alliance on Media and Information Literacy (2025). She has been awarded a Jean Monnet Chair by the European Commission twice, for the periods 2012–2015 and 2025–2028, she has also served as Academic Coordinator of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on “Research on Crucial Issues of European Integration” (2015–2019) and of the Jean Monnet Project “EU Values, Intercultural Dialogue and Diversity” (2018–2022), both at the University of Macedonia.
Since 2021, she has served as an elected member of the Council of the European Law Institute (ELI) in Vienna, Austria. She has also been a member of the Board of the Hellenic Association of European Law since 2018. She holds a Law degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, a Master’s degree in EU Law from the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), and a PhD in European Union Law from the Democritus University of Thrace. During her doctoral research, she completed a traineeship at the Legal Service of the European Commission, including participation in an official visit to Japan, and was awarded a three-month Jean Monnet Scholarship at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence. She worked for more than a decade as a researcher at the Greek Centre of International and European Economic Law in Thessaloniki, following the award of an Evrigenis Scholarship.
Her teaching experience includes EU Law, Human Rights, and Migration and Asylum Law at the University of Macedonia. She has also taught EU Law at the Capital University Law School (Ohio, USA), EU Law at the Greek National School of Magistrates (1999–2002) and Racism, Xenophobia, and Discrimination at the same institution (2016–2021). She has been teaching at the Open University of Cyprus since 2016, where she was awarded the Award for Excellent Teaching (2021), and at the Hellenic Open University since 2025. In addition, she has received a distinction for her contribution to national matters from the Democritus University of Thrace. She has twice served as a national co-rapporteur for Greece at the International Federation of European Law (FIDE).
Prior to joining the European University Institute as a Visiting Fellow, she was a Visiting Researcher at the Court of Justice of the European Union (Luxembourg), the University of Oxford (Institute of European and Comparative Law), and the School of International Affairs at Penn State University (USA), where she presented her research. She has also delivered lectures and presentations at numerous international academic fora, including the Florida International University (FIU) – Miami Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, the, School of Law of the University of California at Berkeley, the University of London (School of Advanced Legal Studies), the Autonomous University of Barcelona, in Russia (Saransk), in Bulgaria (Sandanski), in North Macedonia (Bitola), in Romania (Brașov), and in Azerbaijan (Baku) as well as in the framework of the European Lawyers’ Union.