Elektra Kostopoulou is a Greek-American historian whose teaching and research engage with the Eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Europe, and the Middle East from the perspective of global queries. Through comparative historical analysis, she explores how complex systems evolve, stabilize, and rupture across time — highlighting recurring structural dynamics in migration, empire, law, and global power.
Although her academic journey has unfolded across global contexts — Greece, Turkey, France, the US — it remains deeply rooted in regional histories and lived experience. She is particularly interested in developing alternatives to detached knowledge systems, emphasizing grounded, relational approaches to power, innovation, and storytelling.
Since joining the Department of History at NJIT / Rutgers Newark, she has developed research and teaching initiatives that highlight the urgent need to prioritize humanistic inquiry within the evolving landscape of STEM education and AI-driven technology. Almost ten years in a technical university have sharpened her conviction: the humanities are not peripheral to the age of AI — they are indispensable to it.
Her current work spans questions of self-determination, the global arms trade from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the present. In addition, she is interested in technological innovation that is rooted in the fundamental principle that verified human expertise and lived experience must be woven into the architecture of AI systems, not added as an afterthought.
