Dana Professor of Anthropology Loring Danforth. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Co-written by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ anthropologist Danny Danforth, the first comprehensive study of two children’s evacuation campaigns during the 1948 Greek Civil War has received the prestigious Edmund Keeley Book Prize.

Published in 2012 by the University of Chicago Press, Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory was co-written by Danforth, the Charles A. Dana Professor of History at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, and Riki Van Boeschoten, associate professor of social anthropology and oral history at the University of Thessaly, Greece.

Based in Brunswick, Maine, the Modern Greek Studies Association awards the Keeley Book Prize to an academic book first published in English and dealing with modern Greece or a Hellenic theme. Children of the Greek Civil War shared this year’s first prize with The Balkan Prospect: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece after 1989 by Vangelis Calotychos.

The warring sides in the Greek Civil War evacuated 38,000 children from their homes in the mountains of northern Greece. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries in the national government placed the rest in children’s homes elsewhere in Greece.

A point of contention throughout the Cold War, this controversial episode continues to fuel tensions between Greeks and Macedonians and within Greek society itself.

Marshaling archival records, oral histories and ethnographic fieldwork, Danforth and Van Boeschoten analyzed the evacuation process, the political conflict surrounding it, the children’s upbringings and their fates as adults cut off from their parents and their homeland.

They also give voice to seven refugee children who, as adults, recount their experiences and efforts to construct new lives in diaspora communities throughout the world. A much-needed corrective to previous historical accounts, Children of the Greek Civil War is also a searching examination of the enduring effects of displacement on the lives of refugee children.

“Danforth and Van Goeschoten grippingly tell the stories of thousands of Greek children relocated” during the war, writes K. Dubinsky for Choice Reviews Online. “Amid charges of communist baby snatching and fascist child manipulation, the book charts an astonishingly evenhanded and supremely well-researched course.

“Insisting that refugee children ought to occupy center stage in their own history, the authors support their argument with two chapters of testimony from the historical actors themselves remembering their own childhood experiences,” Dubinsky writes. “This innovative book ends with some insightful thinking about the production of historical memory. Highly recommended.”

Danforth has written three other books, all published by Princeton University Press: The Death Rituals of Rural Greece (with photographer Alexander Tsiaras; 1982); Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement (1989); and The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World (1997).

Now in its second season at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, the 2009 Global Lens film series features the Macedonian film I Am From Titov Veles in showings at 8 p.m. Friday and Sunday, Sept. 18 and 20, in Room 105 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

Hosted by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art, the series continues on Fridays and Sundays at the same time and location throughout the fall. Admission is $5. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu.

Written and directed by Teona Strugar Mitevska, is a contemporary story that follows three sisters who take different paths out of their decaying hometown (2007; 102 min. In Macedonian with English subtitles).

The Global Lens series is produced by the nonprofit Global Film Initiative, created to promote cross-cultural understanding through cinema. Although American film continues to thrive in the global marketplace, filmmaking in the developing world has suffered from shifting economic conditions in financing and distribution. As a result, audiences in the United States have been denied the rich cultural lessons these films have to offer.

Mitevska’s film is set in the scarred town of Veles, where the sisters long to escape the suffocating environment of their dying community. Burdened by memories of their late father, Sapho struggles to secure a visa to Greece, Slavica desperately searches for a rich husband and Afrodita harbors hopes for love and children. Mitevska blends stark realism with memorable performances to create a vivid landscape of life and longing in post-communist Macedonia.

Mitevska was born in Skopje, Macedonia, in 1974. As a child she acted in commercials and dramas in the theater, television and radio. She later trained as a painter and obtained her bachelor’s degree in graphic design. In 1998, she enrolled in the MFA film program at New York University’s Tisch School of Arts. Her first feature film, “How I Killed A Saint,” screened successfully at festivals around the world. I Am From Titov Veles is her second feature film.

Here’s the remaining Global Lens schedule at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½:

, a coming-of-age story set in rural Brazil and directed by Sandra Kogut (Sept. 25 and 27).

, a murder story directed by Ecuadorian director Víctor Arregui and focusing on a doctor at the city morgue forced to confront his connection to the living and the dead (Oct. 2 and 4).

, Indonesian director Nan Triveni Achnas’ story of the unlikely but powerful relationship between a young prostitute and an elderly portrait photographer (Oct. 9 and 11).

, a haunting and suspenseful study of grief and letting go by Argentinian director Sandra Gugliotta (Oct. 16 and 18).

, which follows an orphaned refugee on a journey with an elderly storyteller to find his mother after a devastating civil war. Directed by Teresa Prata of Mozambique (Oct. 30 and Nov. 1).

, by Kazakh director Marat Sarulu, a film described as “darkly somber” and “tender and wistful” that deals with suspicion and cultural differences between longtime friends (Nov. 6 and 8).

, by Iranian director Naghi Nemati, tells of friends who desert their military training and attempt to survive in the wilderness of northern Iran (Nov. 13 and 15).

by Moroccan director Faouzi Bensaïdi closes the series with a film illustrating the complex web of connections between a prostitute, traffic cop and contract killer in modern Casablanca (Dec. 4 and 6).

In The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World, just published by Princeton University Press, Danforth examines the Macedonian conflict in light of contemporary theoretical work on ethnic nationalism, the construction of national identities and cultures, the invention of tradition and the role of the state in building a nation.

The conflict is set in the broader context of Balkan history and the more narrow context of the recent disintegration of Yugoslavia. The book concludes with an analysis of the construction of identity on an individual level among immigrants from northern Greece who have settled in Australia, where multiculturalism is an official policy.

Harvard anthropologist Michael Herzfeld calls the book “the clearest exposition yet of the extraordinary complexities that have led observers to equate Macedonia with ‘confusion’… it is the most dispassionate available commentary on what has become a highly politicized situation. The use of data from Australia is a stroke of genius.”

A cultural anthropologist, Danforth is also the author of The Death Rituals of Rural Greece and Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement, both published by Princeton University Press.

Danforth joined the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty in 1985. He has received number of prestigious grants and fellowships including a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Danforth graduated from Amherst College and received master’s and doctoral degrees from Princeton University.