For an academic profile, please click here.

Lisa Dikomitis was born in Menen, a small town on the Belgian-French border, to a Greek Cypriot father and a Flemish mother. She grew up in the 1980s as a bookish girl, either quietly reading or talking too much and too fast. Not much has changed on that front. By the time she turned 18, two books of her poems were out with a Flemish publisher. A literary sensation that only lasted, so to speak, the length of the launch and press conference! Years later, she caught her siblings writing shopping lists on he pages of the unsold copies. 

She holds undergraduate degrees in  Education and in Art History and Archaeology from the University of Leuven (Belgium). She then moved to Gent where she studied for a Master’s and PhD Degree in Comparative Sciences of Cultures (this is a sociology and social anthropology degree) at Ghent University, also in Belgium. Throughout her time at university, Lisa worked in a flower shop, a bakery and a chip shop (after all, this was in Belgium) and was teaching in different secondary schools. 

There is a standing joke in Lisa's family that she started her academic career working on her father’s predicament and then switched to her mother’s biography. There is some truth in that. Lisa first conducted long-term fieldwork among refugees on Cyprus, living for years among Greek Cypriot refugees in Nicosia and Turkish Cypriot refugees in a small mountain village. When she completed her book on Cyprus, Lisa ventured into medical anthropology. She conducted fieldwork in the psychiatric hospital where her mother worked since the early 1970s until she retired. Since that research on mental health, Lisa is hooked on exploring socio-cultural aspects of health and illness. She now works in different societies across the globe, preferably using ethnographic and creative methods. Lisa is currently working as a medical anthropologist in the United Kingdom. She is a full professor at the University of Kent (UK), where she is Director of the Centre for Health Services Studies, a research centre with over 70 researchers, and Director of Research at the Kent and Medway Medical School. To read more about her work, click here.

Here is a link to her CHSS profile. 

During her years at university, Lisa wrote and performed, with her sister Elena Dikomitis, a theatre play about the war-torn lives of their grandmothers. This collaboration planted the seed to weave approaches from the arts and the humanities into her academic work. The Dikomitis sisters are currently writing a book and making a podcast series in their 'free' time. Lisa is married to anthropologist and cultural theorist Vassos Argyrou. Following Lisa's own upbringing, they are raising their teenage daughter, Nefeli, in a multilingual and multisited family with places they call 'home' in Belgium, Cyprus and the UK. 

Lisa's name is pronounced like this.