Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

Nina M. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer (University of Delaware; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Humanities Program Building, Room 103

Painting in England, France and Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century knew an unprecedented reincarnation of the classical style, transformed through naturalism and evident affinities with the modern scene. Concurrent with lively archaeological activity, expanding tourist circulation, and systematic photographic recording of the sites associated with Greco-Roman antiquity -as I will argue- this refurbished classical manner fulfilled the imperialist fantasies -cultural and political- cultivated by the most powerful European nations in control of the fortunes of "lesser" nations, Italy and Greece, the birthplaces of classical civilization and coveted Mediterranean gateways to far-off imperialist ventures. While ever keen on safeguarding and promoting their rightful ancient heritage, modern Italian and Greek artists and intellectuals resisted such constructions and defiantly proposed their own, in the form of a comprehensive blend of cultural moments that stressed national identity as unbroken cultural continuity through the ages. This paper, a case study on the relation between Britain and Greece, focuses on modern Greece as subject of both imposed "crypto-colonial" imagery and locus of elaboration of the resistance to it.

Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer is Professor of Art History at the University of Delaware. She received a Licence-hs-Lettres from the Institut d'Art et d'Archiologie of the University of Paris (Sorbonne); a doctorate from the School of Philosophy of the University of Thessaloniki (Greece); and a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. She specializes in European eighteenth and nineteenth-century art, which she examines in its cultural, social, and political context. She is the author of three books: French Images from the Greek War of Independence, 1821-1830: Art and Politics under the Restoration (Yale, 1989); Eughne Delacroix: Prints, Politics and Satire (Yale, 1991); and Cizanne and Provence: The Painter in his Culture (Chicago, 2003), which was selected as a finalist for the CAA's Charles Rufus Morey Award for best art history book in 2003. She has published essays in several edited volumes, including the Cambridge Companion to Delacroix (Cambridge, 2001), Critical Terms in Art History (Chicago, 2003), and Modern Art and the Grotesque (Cambridge, 2003). Her articles on J. L. David, Delacroix, Giricault, Horace Vernet and Cizanne have appeared in the Art Bulletin, the Burlington Magazine, and the Gazette des Beaux Arts, among others. She was the guest editor of the Art Journal's issue on Romanticism (1993), and served as the Book Review Editor of the Art Bulletin from 1995 to 1998. Her article "Under the Sign of Leonidas: The Political and Ideological Significance of David's Leonidas at Thermopylae" won the CAA's Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize. She has held a J. P. Getty Fellowship, a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, an American Philosophical Society Grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was visiting professor at the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in 1993, 1995 and 2002. This past Fall she was Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art).    [Last Updated 2004]

211 Dickison Hall
Reading packets are available in the Departments of History and Classics.

Humanities Programs Building, Room 103

Christoph Riedweg (Zürich)
Humanities Programs Building, Room 103

To judge from the many Christian refutations of which we hear, the massive work Against the Christians by the erudite Platonic philosopher and philologist Porphyry of Tyre (ca. 234-305/10 A. D.) must have been considered by Christians as a serious threat to their religion well beyond its author's death. Unfortunately the work remains largely elusive today, since only very few fragments have come down to us. Accordingly there is much room for speculation and scholarly dissent. Not only date and place of its composition are highly controversial, but also the general thrust of the attack, as well as the relation between this work and Porphyry's Philosophy from Oracles, which also partially dealt with Christ and Christianity and therefore has recently been connected with Against the Christians. However, at a closer look there remain substantial differences. Whereas Against the Christians was mainly intended to "slander the Holy Scriptures and to revile and denigrate their Christian interpreters" (Eusebius), the Philosophy from Oracles, which seems to have been addressed to fellow "initiated" into religious Platonic philosophy, tried to bring to light the deep philosophical meaning hiding in oracles of Apollo and other gods and good demons. A famous oracle of Hecate on Christ and the Christians is particularly instructive for the Christian-pagan debate in the third and fourth centuries C.E. The goddess, and with her also Porphyry, sharply distinguishes between Christ and the Christians, the latter being totally rejected as ignorant and polluted. Christ, however, is recognized as a morally outstanding, "most pious" man, whose passion is interpreted against the background of Platonic philosophy as a general statement about the situation of the incarnated soul which is "always exposed to crippling torments." Such an interpretation possibly marks out the boundaries within which a rapprochement of pagan religious philosophy and early Christianity was actually conceivable, if at all.

Christoph Riedweg has been Ordinary Professor for Classics/Greek Literature at Zürich University since 1996. He is the author of the books: Mysterienterminologie bei Platon, Philon und Klemens von Alexandrien (Berlin-New York 1987); Jüdisch-hellenistische Imitation eines orphischen Hieros Logos - Beobachtungen zu OF 245 und 247 (sog. Testament des Orpheus) (Tübingen 1993); Ps.-Justin (Markell von Ankyra?), Ad Graecos de vera religione (bisher "Cohortatio ad Graecos"). Einleitung und Kommentar (Basel 1994); Pythagoras: Leben - Lehre - Nachwirkung. Eine Einführung (München 2002; a translation into English shall be published by Cornell University Press in 2005). He has also published several articles for example on Orphism, Tragedy and Hellenistic Literature. He is currently working on a new critical edition of Cyril of Alexandria's Against Julian.    [Last Updated 2004]

Slobodan Ćurčić (Department of Art and Archaeology)
106 McCormick Hall

Ioannis D. Stefanidis (Aristotle University of Thessalonki; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Humanities Program Building, room 103

After "9/11" and the recent United States interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, anti-Americanism is receiving growing attention among scholars, journalists as well as practitioners of politics. Anti-Americanism is a tidal phenomenon, which is as old as the United States of America itself. Its flows and ebbs, however, intensified as that state assumed the role of the leading Western and, currently, world power, after World War II. Anti-Americanism in post-war Greece may be documented in a variety of sources: United States diplomatic records offer more than a glimpse, whereas a wealth of material may be provided by the Greek press, parliamentary records, and a number of non-state archival sources. In tracing the post-war origins of this phenomenon, a two-tiered approach may be in order. First, the political-historical context is provided by the course of Greek-American relations, itself an important chapter of the Cold War period. A number of long held assumptions about the pattern of these relations and certain key events (e.g., the recurrent Cyprus crises or the military coup of 1967), which fed anti-Americanism in Greece, may now be tested against an increasing volume of scholarly research. Second, Greek political culture may serve as an appropriate context for shedding light on anti-Americanism, which remains a recurrent theme of the political discourse in Greece during the last half century. Documenting anti-Americanism and providing the appropriate historical context may seem a fairly straightforward matter. Placing the phenomenon within Greek political culture is definitely more demanding. It requires familiarization with the much-debated concept of political theory, an unenviable task for an historian. Given the variety of approaches to political culture, their eclectic use may not be totally unwarranted. Last, but not least, this approach may open the way for a meaningful discussion of the phenomenon in a comparative perspective.

Ioannis D. Stefanidis studied law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and European Studies and International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has worked for the BBC World Service, the Institute of Balkan Studies, and the Anatolia College of Higher Studies of Thessaloniki. He teaches Diplomatic History at the Faculty of Law, School of Law and Economics of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He was awarded Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Fulbright scholarships. He is the author of the following books: The Last European Century: Diplomacy and Policies of the Powers, 1871-1945 (in Greek) [Athens, 1997]; Isle of Discord: Nationalism, Imperialism and the Making of the Cyprus Question [London and New York, 1999]; From Civil War to Cold War: Greece and the Allied Factor, 1949-52 (in Greek) [Athens, 1999]; Asymmetrical Partners: Greece and the United States in the Cold War (in Greek) [Athens, 2002].    [Last Updated 2004]

103 Humanities Programs Building

Students in Brady Kiesling's WWW 487/HLS 487 class will report on their recent trip to Greece, sponsored by the Program in Hellenic Studies. This is a wonderful opportunity to meet our undergraduate students and hear about their research projects and travel experiences

Cappella Romana - Event Poster
Alexander Lingas, Choir Director

University Chapel
Free Admission. Open to the Public.
Co-Sponsored by the Department of Music

The professional vocal ensemble Cappella Romana makes its East Coast debut in April 2004 with Music for the Fall of Constantinople, a program of Latin and Greek works reflecting the medieval twilight of the Roman Empire. Music to be performed includes majestic Byzantine chants, Latin ceremonial motets and two haunting laments commemorating the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, by Guillaume Dufay (c. 1399-1474) and Manuel Chrysaphes, court musician to the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI. Cappella Music Director Alexander Lingas will conduct the concert. Dr. Lingas is a Fellow of Oxford University's European Humanities Research Centre and Assistant Professor of Music History at Arizona State University, and currently a member of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.

Ambassador Thomas Weston (U.S. State Department, Cyprus Coordinator)
Robertson Hall, Bowl One
Sponsored by the Program in Hellenic Studies and the Princeton Institute for International Regional Studies.

David Large (Montana State University)
Humanities Program Building, Room 103

The German National Socialists considered themselves the true heirs of the ancient Greeks and insisted that the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin were closer in spirit to the classical contests than any of the "modern" games held since 1896. They also sought to improve upon the traditions handed down by Baron Coubertin, the founder of the modern games. My paper will examine the ways in which the organizers of the 1936 games used and abused the Olympic legacy, ancient and modern; it will also explore the reception that this effort evoked within the broader Olympic community.

David Large is Professor of History at Montana State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He previously taught at Smith College and Yale University. David Large has received several awards and scholarships, including the Cox Award for Creative Scholarship and Teaching, a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Author of nine books , he has written extensively on the history of Nazi Germany. His most recent publications are Where Ghosts Walked: Munich's Road to the Third Reich (New York: Norton, 1997); Berlin (New York: Basic Books, 2000); And the World Closed Its Doors. One Family's Abandonment to the Holocaust (New York: Basic Books, 2003); and Nazi Games: A History of the 1936 German Olympics (New York: Norton, forthcoming).    [Last Updated 2004]

Hermann Kienast (German Archaeological Institute, Athens)
106 McCormick Hall

Maria Christina Chatziioannou (National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Jonathan Israel (Institute for Advanced Study)
Humanities Program Building, Room 103

Historiographical production in Greece, with regard to international commercial activity in the Ottoman-Greek zone, has focused on activities such as the exploitation of agricultural surplus, the transportation of goods across major Mediterranean port-cities, as well as shipping activities. These themes are an integral part of Greek economic history. The history of the merchant is often reflected through the study of Greek diaspora communities. Although commerce is an internationalized activity that attracted many merchants into international and cross-border transactions, the absence of comparative studies is evident. Two main historiographical trends referring to commercial activity construct the image of the merchant in Greek historiography. The first historiographical approach highlights the prevalence of an ethnocentric view of economic issues: the positive view of commerce and merchants in modern Greek historiography stems from their contribution to the Greek War of Independence (1821) and the phenomenon of national benefactors. In this case, scholars totally disregard the actual commercial activity before and during the Greek War of Independence. The second historiographical approach is guided by the political-ideological burden of historical interpretation deriving from Marxism. Such an approach formulates a negative stand against commerce and the merchant, and is founded mainly on political or sociological studies focusing on the historical evolution of the Greek state. The fundamental issue appears to be the appraisal of the historical significance of commercial capitalism versus industrial development, which presupposes the analysis of the structure of Greek society in relation to class issues. My own methodological approach to this subject focuses on the following themes: (a) A network analysis of merchant groups in the Greek communities of the Greek diaspora and the Greek State; (b). A comparative analysis with similar trade groups- intermediaries (e.g., Jews, Armenians, Indians, etc.) in capitalistic exchanges; (c) A systemic analysis of national benefactors: the typology of their personal and professional trajectories.

Maria Christina Chatziioannou studied History at the Faculty of Letters, University of Athens and at the Scuola di Perfezionamento di Storia Medioevale e Moderna, Universita di Sapienza, Rome. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Athens (1989). She has published on Greek merchant houses and entrepreneurs: (editor) The Traders Association of Athens (1902-2002). A Historical Retrospective on the Collective Conscience of Merchants, Athens 2000 (in Greek); (coeditor) Memoirs, A. Syngros, Athens 1997 (in Greek); (coeditor) Metaxourgeion, Athens 1997, as well as on Greek regional history: The Historical Evolution of Settlements in the Valley of Aliakmon During the Turkish Period, Athens 2000 (in Greek). Her Latest publicaton is Family Strategy and Commercial Competition. The House of Gerussi in the Nineteenth Century, Athens 2003 (in Greek). She is Director of Studies (2004- ) of the program "History of Enterprises-Industrial Archaeology" at the Institute for Neohellenic Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens. Her current project is a comparative analysis of merchants networks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  [Last Updated 2004]

In connection with the colloquium Mapping the Avant-Garde
James Stewart Film Theatre

Christine Philliou (Doctoral candidate, History Department)