Speaking & Events

As a public speaker, Christopher Deliso has considerable experience as both an invited expert for high-level closed governmental and think-tank  events, as a topical lecturer, and as a participant in specialized open events requiring exchange of insihts and knowledge.

Announcements regarding Christopher Deliso’s upcoming 2023-2024 Speaking & Events will be made on this page in due course. Event organizers wishing to inquire about Christopher Deliso’s future availability as a speaker are welcome, and should see the Contact page.

Generally, past event speaking and participation engagements can be divided into the categories of  Education/Culture/Travel and Security/International Relatiions/Area Studies.

Thus, general information is provided below about the author’s past speaking engagements under these categories. It is hoped that these brief descriptions of speaking engagements and events will help illustrate by example the remarkable variety of topical expertise and types of venues at which Christopher Deliso has spoken in his career, always just as an ancillary activity to his main focus on writing.

Education/Culture/Travel

Christoper Deliso was an invited speaker at the International Flann O’Brien Society (IFOBS) annual conference, held virtually due to the then-pandemic. This annual event, which attracts expert scholars devoted to the Irish author Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan), was marked by numerous fascinating contributions to O’Brien studies. In his presentation, Christopher Deliso discussed the aesthetics of linguistic usage and the historical context of one of the 1946 Irish Times columns (the Cruiskeen Lawn series) penned by O’Nolan and two of his colleagues.

Cross-Cultural Communications was the subject of a 2016 seminar that Christopher Deliso was asked to lead as part of an Erasmus program for the M6 Center, an educational and training body in Skopje; at the same venue, he had previously given a special lecture on the life and legacy of late Byzantine philosopher Georgios Gemistos Plethon (the subject of the author’s Oxford MPhil thesis).

In October 2014, Christopher Deliso gave a presentation on sustainable Tourism at the Perspectives on Tourism in the Black Sea Area conference co-organized by the International Centre for Black Sea Studies (ICBSS) and Hellenic Ministry of Tourism, held in Athens. The event brought together regional tourism officials, industry professionals, media and other experts with an interest in travel and tourism.

In summer of the same year, Christopher Deliso was invited by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki to make presentations on Travel Writing and the Environment, as part of its special summer workshop for journalism students from Greece and Cyprus, an event held hear Chania, Crete.

Over the years, Christopher Deliso has participated in numerous other conferences and special events going back to 1998, on subjects ranging from travel and tourism development to Byzantine Studies and literature. He also has taught English in three countries and holds a TEFL certificate (University of Nottingham, 1999).

Security/International Relations/Area Studies

Beginning in 2010, Christopher Deliso was invited by the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and National Intelligence Council (NIC) to provide special presentations in private briefing events for incoming US ambassadors to Albania, Montenegro, and Kosovo.

During NATO’s 2011 Libya intervention, he was subsequently invited to speak about regional risk factors,identity politics, and future security scenarios for the Balkans and Mediterranean Europe at a closed events organized jointly by the US the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) of the U.S. State Department, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in cooperation with the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madrid.

From 2009 through 2016, Christopher Deliso was also an invited speaker and participant at several high-level workshops bringing together diplomats, policy-makers, practitioners and civil-society members, co-organized in various locations by the Aspen Institute Germany and the foreign ministries of Albania, Montenegro and Kosovo. These events encouraged frank discussion of regional situation realities, potential future trends, and the exchange of research. These events proved valuable for cooperative assessment during the years of regional transition towards Euro-Atlantic integration, and were conducted with class by the organizers, creating a unique  ‘formal yet informal’ tenor of dialogue.

Back in the US, Christopher Deliso was also an invited speaker at an analytic training workshop incorporating both technology majors and human analysis, organized by George Mason University, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in Fairfax, VA. Later on, in 2014, Christopher Deliso was invited to speak among other experts by the US Defense Intelligence Agency at an inter-agency briefing held in an compartmentalized SCIF in a subterranean cavern of the Pentagon.

Christopher Deliso has also been invited several times to present his research findings on various aspects of Balkan security and regional cooperation at special conferences organized by the Bulgarian Ministry of Defense and the Rakovski Defense Academy in Sofia. He also participated in other European conferences such as The Economist Roundtable with the Government of Greece (in Athens), and the Kosovo Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ workshop on Interfaith Dialogue (in Pristina). And in Turkey in 2013, he was requested to attend aspecial seminar on Turkey’s new regional role, co-organized by USAK and the British institute at Ankara.

As director of Balkanalysis.com, Christopher Deliso also co-organized and spoke at successful events with universities in Italy and Romania, on the post-Yugoslav experience and Balkan-Baltic relations, respectively. These events brougt together specialist authors, academics and diplomats for insightful and inspired exchange of perspectives and explorations of new and previously under-explored research linkages.

More recently, Christopher Deliso has been an invited participant at the September 2021 NATO Partnership for Peace’s Consortium Study Group, Regional Stability Southeast Europe NATO PfP Consortium Study Group “Regional Stability in South East Europe,” organized by the Austrian National Defence Academy and George C. Marshall Center, held in Skopje. In December 2022, Christopher Deliso also participated (virtually) in the seminar, Balkan and Black Sea Perspectives 2022, organized by the NATO Defense College Foundation and Italian Foreign Ministry in Rome.

At the same time, he also participated virtually in several forecasting seminars from risk-analysis consultancies analyzing present and future risk outcomes on regional and global levels across the full spectrum of diplomatic, security and economic concerns, ranging from East Asia/China economic and political developments to the Russian-Ukrainian war, the geopolitical multipower struggle for Africa, and political trends in Latin America.