Stass Paraskos: Critical Frameworks

A new publication by Dr Michael Paraskos (Teaching Fellow in Art History and Imperial after:hours Programme Manager), offers a fresh and timely reassessment of one of Cyprus’s most significant modern artists. Stass Paraskos: Critical Frameworks  not only revisits the work of the artist but does so with a uniquely personal perspective: the subject of the book is Dr Paraskos’s father, Stass Paraskos.

Drawing on Hayden White’s theory of emplotment as well as influential post‑colonial thinkers,, Dr Paraskos challenges long‑standing assumptions about his father as a “peasant painter” or naïve modernist. Instead, the book presents Stass Paraskos as an intellectually engaged artist deeply embedded in conversations around identity, migration, colonial inheritance and cultural resistance.

Through close readings of paintings, writings and the founding of the Cyprus College of Art, Stass Paraskos: Critical Frameworks positions the artist within broader debates on hybridity, marginality and the politics of interpretation—issues that continue to shape how artists working beyond the dominant Western art centres are understood.

The book interrogates how we interpret art, how critical narratives are formed, and how they can be challenged. In doing so, it opens up more expansive and pluralistic ways of writing art history, not only for Cyprus but for the global condition of art today.

The book has already received high praise. Dr Andonis Piperoglou, Hellenic Senior Lecturer in Global Diasporas at the University of Melbourne, has described it as “one of the best works I have read on diaspora and Cyprus.”

Published by Orage Press, the book is available in paperback from a range of booksellers  Stass Paraskos: Critical Frameworks (Orage Press, 2026).