2025 Speakers
Aris Politopoulos, Assistant Professor in Archaeology and Cultural Politics, Leiden University
Aris Politopoulos is an Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Cultural Politics at Leiden University, Faculty of Archaeology. Prior to that he was a post-doctoral fellow at The Centre for the Arts in Sociaty (LUCAS) at Leiden University and together with Angus Mol and Sybille Lammes they developed the Past-at-Play Lab, a data driven experimental study of ancient board games and contemporary games that deal with the past. His research currently focuses on play in past societies, the archaeological study of video games, the archaeology of West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as archaeology and anarchism. Aris is a co-founder of the VALUE Foundation, together with Angus Mol and others, a foundation that works at the intersection of video games and the past. Through VALUE he has conducted a number of science outreach projects. He has published extensively on the topic of video games and archaeology.