‘Europe means cosmopolitanism, openness’

Elaine Papoulias lives in Lincoln, Massachusetts, a small town with a population of about 7,000, half an hour from Boston, which she said reminds her of Laconia. Every day she wakes up at 5.30 a.m., in time to take her teenage daughter to school and then drive to the fine early 20th-century building that houses the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), a division of the Harvard School of Arts and Sciences. Papoulias has been executive director of the "oldest university center of modern European studies," founded in 1969, since 2013. The mission of the CES is to promote research and study of the European continent while also welcoming prominent European academics and leaders.

Papoulias was born in Boston. Her mother arrived in the United States at the age of 15 in 1952 from Sparta, and stayed with an aunt and uncle who were willing to host one of the family's...