Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

58 Prospect, Room 107

Andreas Kalvos is the Ionian poet whose name and main work, the Odes (1824 and 1826), have been most closely associated with the discovery of the Greek landscape. This workshop will consider to what extent such a traditional reading of Kalvos as a poet of the period of the Greek War of Independence, inspired by the beauty of Ionian island nature, does credit to his complex use of classical imagery and style. To this end, apart from textual analysis, I will put Kalvos in the context of an anticipated readership that owes more to the philhellenic circles of Europe, rather than his immediate inspiration by Greek nature.

CONSTANZE GUTHENKE holds a Master's degree in European Literature from Cambridge University and a D. Phil. in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford. Her main research interest is in the fields of comparative literature and cultural history. Her Master's thesis on the poetry of Dionysios Solomos and its German Romantic parallels, was followed by a doctoral thesis entitled "The Topos of Freedom - the Importance of Greek landscape and locality in German and Greek Writing, 1770-1840," focussing on the literary and aesthetic relevance given to Greek landscape, locality and nature imagery at a time when Greece, as a cultural ideal, assumed additional importance as a material, territorial and political entity. She has published/is publishing articles on Solomos, Kalvos and Wilhelm Muller. Her current research is concerned with the interplay of religious imagery in the aesthetic and political discourses applied to Greece (ancient and modern), and with the question of the Classical tradition. [Last Updated 2002]

This presentation addresses the relationships between the practices and narratives produced by the ansnational beauty industry and the social imagining of local and translocal identities in women's everyday experience. Drawing from ethnographic data collected at four neighborhood day spas located in urban Greece, it examines the hegemonic representations and narrative configurations of the 'ideal' feminine body currently produced and circulated by the global beauty industry, and how these are adapted, negotiated and contested by the women patrons of these establishments. The day spa is a site where urban Greek women are confronted with the transformation of the local body into the ideal modern and transnational body - a body that is predominantly constructed by the beauty industry as heterosexual, white, and youthful. Routine feminizing practices taking place at this site such as hair removal, deep skin cleansing, and peeling are embedded and reproduce discourses of modernity, middle-classness, and whiteness. In the process of consuming the feminizing practices and normalizing discourses offered at the day spa, urban Greek women become implicated in transforming their 'Mediterranean' bodies into modern bodies. In order to do this, they have to exorcize that which is constructed as local bodily pollution, and in the process engage in class, race, and nationalist identity politics currently unfolding at the local level. The Day Spa and the products it offers for consumption are useful points of entry to understand how the hierarchies of place are being played out in the realm of consumption, and how the female body is a focal point for the reproduction of the local/global divide in everyday life. Moreover, it sheds light on the importance of whiteness for the process of Europeanization.

CHRISY MOUSATSOS holds a Ph.D. in Social Science from the University of California, Irvine (2001),with dissertation on 'Transnational Beauty Culture and Local Bodies: An Ethnographic Account of Consumption and Identity in Urban Greece.' Her research interests include the ethnography of Greece; feminist theory; globalization and capitalism; and the processes and practices of Europeanization. During the academic year 2001-02 she was a Lecturer in Women's Studies and Anthropology at Scripps College. [Last Updated 2002]

SUSAN OSSMAN is Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University. Her latest book is Three Faces of Beauty, Casablanca, Cairo, Paris ( Duke University Press, 2002). [Last Updated 2002]

58 Prospect, Room 107

This workshop will present highlights from my research which reevaluates the art and architecture of Byzantine Cappadocia in the tenth and eleventh centuries AD, by focusing on a well-preserved but largely undocumented medieval settlement located in the Peristrema Valley. Ever since European travelers and explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came upon Cappadocia's romantic landscape of volcanic rock formations, scholars have studied the region's numerous painted churches, while neglecting the diverse secular aspects of its rich material culture. Consequently, past scholarship has interpreted Cappadocia's medieval sites as monasteries, and Cappadocia's art and architecture, therefore, as overwhelmingly monastic in form, function, and context. My work, by contrast, offers a secular and residential interpretation for most of the region's rock-cut architecture, including the relatively large settlement of the Peristrema Valley. This reinterpretation of the human landscape of medieval Cappadocia is especially significant for our understanding of Byzantine domestic architecture and secular space, which is otherwise poorly documented and understood.

VERONICA G. KALAS received her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she specialized in the fields of Early Christian and Byzantine Art and Architecture, together with a minor in Byzantine History. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she majored in Art History and Classical Archaeology. She has participated in a variety of archaeological projects in Tunisia, Greece, and Turkey, and volunteered in the preparation of the exhibition, "The Glory of Byzantium" held at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has taught art history at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, and the University of Michigan, Dearborn. She is currently revising her doctoral thesis for publication.  [Last Updated 2002]

58 Prospect Avenue Room 107, Princeton, NJ

Nikos Fokas
Poet, Athens
Writer-in-Residence, Program in Hellenic Studies
nphocas@princeton.edu

Don Schofield
University of La Verne, Athens;
Writer-in-Residence, Program in Hellenic Studies
gschofie@princeton.edu

NIKOS FOKAS was born in Athens. Educated at Athens College, he graduated from the University of Athens with a degree in History and Archaeology. From 1961 to 1971, he worked in London at the Overseas Services of the BBC. Back to Greece in 1974, he took a job as a high school teacher. In 1981, he participated in the International Writers Program of the University of Iowa. He has published 13 books of poetry, a fairy tale for adults, and two books of essays on literary and linguistic subjects. He has translated Robert Frost, Kay Cicellis, and Charles Baudelaire (Greek National State Prize, 1994) into Greek and his own poems have been translated in several languages. In 1997 he received the "Diavazo" annual award for poetry. [Last Updated 2002]

DON SCHOFIELD was born in Nevada and raised in California. He holds a B.A. in Social Science and in English, and an M.A. in English, all from California State University, Sacramento; and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. Since 1980 he has lived in Greece, teaching at the University of La Verne, while traveling in the Eastern Mediterranean and writing poetry. In recent years he has also been translating contemporary Greek poets into English, most notably Nikos Fokas, Liana Sakelliou-Schultz and Kiki Dimoula. His latest book is "Approximately Paradise" (University Press of Florida, 2002). He is currently writing a book on the community of American writers living in Greece and is preparing an anthology of poems by American poets who have lived in Greece. He is the recipient of the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize (Honorable Mention, 2000, University of Southern California). [Last Updated 2002]