Mika has been a mentor with the GradFutures Graduate Alum Mentorship Program at Princeton since its creation in 2019, working with graduate students in several departments in the Humanities. She is an independent scholar, translator, editorial consultant and illustrator, and a contributing editor for the literary journal Bookanista. At Princeton, Mika was a recipient of the Stanley Seeger and the J. F. Costopoulos fellowships, and read for an MA and a PhD in Comparative Literature in the fields of Classics, English, French, Philosophy and Modern Greek. She taught in several departments while there, was a Cotsen Fellow, and also a graduate fellow at Matthey College, where she led a workshop on ancient drama, staging Antigone in the summer of 2000. Her other studies include Art History, Drama & Scenography, Photography and Cinema. She has additional degrees from the University of Athens (BA summa cum laude), Sorbonne (Diploma in Cinema studies) and Sussex (MA in English Literature and Literary Theory). She has been Chair of the Princeton Alumni Schools Committee of the UK since 2009, and is currently also ASC Chair for France and for the Netherlands, as well as serving her second term as PSC mentor for select regions in Europe, the US and Africa. She is the recipient of the S. Barksdale Penick Jr. '25 Award for her ASC work (2010) and the Alumni Council Award for Service to Princeton (2018), and she served on the Advisory Council of the Department of Comparative Literature until its dissolution in 2022. Mika is married to Édouard Carlone '00 and they live with their daughter in London.

Experience with GradFUTURES Graduate Alum Mentorship Program

I have been mentoring graduate students at Princeton for three years, and it has been a truly remarkable experience—of intellectual community and of human engagement, of wonder and enrichment, an opportunity to give back and to pass on to younger scholars things that I learned from the many teachers who have taught me, from the paths I have myself travelled so far and the people I have met along the way.

Advice to graduate students

Try to have meaningful connections—with your work, with those who teach you, with those you will teach in turn, and engage with. Help others find that meaningfulness for themselves. Do not be afraid to ask and to connect, to seek to understand and to explore far and wide. Above all to cherish what is a unique time in your lives.

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