Spyros grew up in Athens, Greece, in the midst of a military dictatorship, initially oblivious to it, but increasingly aware of the symbolic and physical violence inherent in the sanitized and sterile dystopia a handful of arrogant, mediocre army officers had been trying to impose on a society that was still trying to recover from a bitter civil war. He grew up in a house full of books, failed to learn to play the piano but became fluent in French and English fairly early on. With hindsight, he would describe his schooling as a mixed bag of tedious reproduction of clichés and kitsch about the nation, religion and patriarchy with instances of enlightened immersion to classics and humanities (he still remembers his ‘unconventional’ junior high school religious studies teacher teaching Fromm, Krishnamurti and Marcuse instead of the approved curriculum to a class of bewildered teenagers who did not recognize her passion and commitment. After finishing high school, by sheer luck, the rigid and bureaucratic Greek university admission system landed him at Panteion University where he studied politics and international studies (alongside a generous dose of law and economics) under the guidance of some of the most enthusiastic and innovative university teachers in Greece at the time. In 1985, he moved to the University of Kent where he studied political sociology. Over the next few years, like a child in a candy shop, he could not resist the lure of critical theory (of all hues and flavours) and of psychoanalytical studies (and this does not mean only Lacan!) alongside more mainstream political and social theory. In that period he also started teaching and being interested in the study of identity, nationalism and societal insecurity. He also became an avid cook and baker and wore out four bicycles cycling around Kent and Sussex (ok, he smashed one on a stone fence inconveniently located in the middle of his route coming down Tyler Hill), protested against a lot of things including an unpalatable government, the Gulf War and the atrocious food served in Rutherford College and 'interrailed' a lot throughout Europe until he found himself without a passport as he had to suffer the consequences of not doing his military service back in Greece - this, last, experience made him see airports and immigration officers in a totally different light, but that is another story... In 1994, he joined the University of Portsmouth to work on a project on nationalism in Europe, and a few years later, after a lot of thought, he temporarily returned to Greece to do his military service. His "tour of duty" started at a training camp in Crete informally designated as a camp for Greeks from "abroad", including conscripts that had failed to report for duty in time and "returnees" (mainly Greeks from the former USSR)and ended in a camp buried in snow at the northernmost point of Greece overlooking Bulgaria and Turkey, where, the only distraction in the frozen winter nights was music from Edirne's radio stations just on the other side of the border. He returned to Portsmouth as a Senior Research Fellow and, later, Senior Lecturer in international politics. In 2000, he moved to Kingston University where he worked to launch an MSc in International Conflict which he also directed. In 2011 he took a visiting research fellowship at SEESOX, St Antony's College, Oxford where he is part of a team working on a project on identities in Southeast Europe, while, as of 2012, he has been based at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Lund University.