Gëzim Alpion

Educated at the Universities of Cairo and Durham, Dr Gëzim Alpion is Lecturer in Sociology in Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. Alpion specializes in the sociology of success, religion, nationality, media and authorship and is considered as “the most authoritative English-language author” on Mother Teresa. Initially published by Routledge in London, New York and New Delhi, his controversial study ‘Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity?’ (2007 & 2008) was released in Italian by Salerno Editrice in Rome in 2008. Alpion’s other publications include two collections of essays ‘Foreigner Complex’ (2002) and ‘Encounters with Civilizations: From Alexander the Great to Mother Teresa’ (2011). In his politically-incorrect plays ‘Vouchers’ (2001) and ‘If Only the Dead Could Listen’ (2008), which have been successfully performed across the UK, Alpion addresses the topical issue of the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers in the West. Alpion is currently developing the idea of “fame capital” as a variable in an intranational and international context, and exploring the significance of Mother Teresa’s “dark night of the soul” in a post-modernist context.

Email: g.i.alpion@bham.ac.uk

Issue: 1:2 (The second issue)

Focusing on the nature of the intra-national relations among ‘indigenous’ British peoples and their attitudes towards the ‘alien’ population that had started arriving in Britain in the late 1940s, I propose that Enoch Powell’s 1968 speeches reflected a ‘traditional’ stance towards the colonial ‘other’ as well as a concern about the demographic changes taking place in parts of Britain, especially in England, in the late 1960s.