Sotiris Kampanelis
Assistant Professor of Economics
Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University (UK)

Email: kampaneliss@cardiff.ac.uk
Office: Room F17, Aberconway Building, Colum Road, Cathays, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK
University page: https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/1751419-kampanelis-sotirios
X (Twitter): @SKampanelis
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sotiris-kampanelis-289b7a142/

I joined Cardiff Business School in January 2020 at the Department of Economics. I hold a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland and my research interests lie in the broad area of economic history, development economics, political economy, and economic geography.

Regarding my research, I study how history—especially ancient civilisations and Indigenous institutions—shapes modern economic geography. In work published in the Journal of Economic Geography, I treat ancient Mediterranean civilisations as economic systems whose colonial networks seeded durable spatial patterns. My current Songlines project takes a parallel ancient-civilisations perspective on Indigenous Australia, viewing Aboriginal paths (Songlines) as civilisational infrastructure that guided European exploration and settlement and still structures contemporary economic outcomes. Extending this history-and-institutions lens, my Economics Letters article introduces an ethnic-homelands dataset for Latin America to study how pre-colonial institutions map onto present-day development. I also study violence against minorities: work on the geography of U.S. lynching shows a long economic shadow on mobility and opportunity, and a new project on Peru’s Shining Path uses quasi-random conflict exposure across cohorts to show that adolescent-age violence depresses Indigenous self-identification and mother-tongue retention—consistent with own-group violence eroding identity. Across these projects, I combine economic history, ancient worlds, Indigenous knowledge, and economic analysis to explain persistent spatial patterns over time.