Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

Program in Hellenic Studies and Department of Classics
Michael Paschalis - University of Crete; Visiting Scholar, Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation (U.S.A.) Seminars Program
Humanities Programs Building, Seminar Room 103
Cosponsored by the Program in Italian Studies

Carla Hesse (University of California, Berkeley; Fellow Council for the Humanities)
Thomas W. Laqueur (University of California, Berkeley; Fellow Council for the Humanities)
Humanities Programs Building, Room 103

The world of the dead-- in this case a particular cemetery-- is, among all the others things it might be, a prism for the world of the living that refracts the past and the present. We examine how, in the context of the Holocaust, urban planning, and the cultural imperatives of creating a new national state, the largest and one of the most ancient, Jewish cemetery in the world disappeared without trace beneath the modern Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Anastasia Stouraiti (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Molly Greene (Department of History and Program in Hellenic Studies)
Humanities Program Building, Room 103

This talk will focus on Venetians' perception and conceptualization of their war against the Turks for the conquest of the Greek region of the Morea (Peloponnese) at the end of the 17th century. I will discuss the broader historical culture, which included narrative and non-narrative modes of representing the present and the past, and was subject to social and commercial forces that affected the way in which early modern Venetians thought, read, and wrote about the Venetian-Turkish war and the new conquests. In order to demonstrate how war shapes a culture, but also how culture constructs the meaning of war, I will focus on versions of public history and the production of civic memory as aspects of the politics of culture in late 17th century Venice. Finally, I will examine certain cultural events in Venice and how they shaped the idea of the Venetian empire and its representation in art, journalism, and history-writing: trade and colonies shaped Venetian culture as much as culture constructed particular visions of dominion and empire.

Anastasia Stouraiti holds an undergraduate degree in History from the University of Athens. A Greek State Scholarship and the Italian Institute of Culture in Athens supported her graduate studies, as well as her archival and bibliographical research. She completed an M.A. in early modern Greek history at the University of Athens, where she earned the Ph.D. degree (2003) with a dissertation on Mars in the Mirror: The Reception of the War of Morea (1684-1699) in Venice. Anastasia Stouraiti did extensive research in Venice, where she worked for the Querini Stampalia Foundation and taught for the History Department of the Ca'Foscari University. She has published articles and exhibition catalogues on Venetian history. Her main interests are the history of the Venetian empire and its Greek territories; the history of print and manuscript culture; early modern journalism; and the politics of information and public history in the early modern period. [Last Updated 2004]

Jilly Traganou (University of Thessaly; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Tuesday, October 19, 2004

For the Athens Olympics 2004, Santiago Calatrava was commissioned in 2001 to design the roof of the Olympic Stadium. The roof, carried by two 300m. wide and 72m. high parabolic arches, aspired to become the center point of the Athens Olympics and was the first attempt in Greece's modern history to re-image Athens, by placing a new, modern landmark parallel to the Acropolis. This paper will examine the reception of the stadium roof in the press during the last three years, from construction to completion of the project. An assessment of these diverse and usually conflicting reviews will expose issues of nationalism and globalization that are deeply embedded in the encodings of Calatrava's roof; it will also reveal variations on the themes of national identity and Greekness that have been major preoccupations of cultural politics and design in Greece since its establishment as a nation-state.

Jilly Traganou holds a professional degree in Architecture (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 1990) and a Ph.D. (University of Westminster, 1998). She was awarded fellowships by Monubsho, the Greek State Fellowships Foundation, the Japan Foundation and the E.U. Science & Technology Institute. During the periods 1991-93, 1996-97 and 1999-2000 she was a visiting fellow at Kyoto University and at Tokyo Keizai University. She has taught at the University of Texas at Austin (1999-2003) and at the School of Architecture of the University of Thessaly in Volos (2003-04). She is the author of The Tokaido Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan (Routledge 2004) which was supported by a Graham Foundation grant. She has contributed articles in Suburbanizing the Masses (Ashgate 2003), Japanese Capitals (Routledge 2003), and Villes En Gares (L'Aube 1999), as well as the architectural journal Architecture d'Aujourd'hui.  [Last Updated 2004]

Maria Evangelatou (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Anne-Marie Bouche (Art and Archaeology)
Humanities Program Building, Room 103

The first psalters with illustrations in the margins of their folios that have survived from Byzantium are dated shortly after the end of iconoclasm (843) and are related to the patriarchal circle of Constantinople. Their miniatures often function as sophisticated cases of visual exegesis, with multiple connections to iconophile polemics. This paper examines one level of iconophile references, central to the understanding of the manuscripts' function. Old and New Testament confrontations of good and evil - from David killing animals and beheading Goliath, to Christ defeating demons, sickness and death - are interpreted as allusions to the conflict of iconophiles and iconoclasts. Three basic arguments are used to support this approach: the iconographic and compositional peculiarities of the miniatures themselves; the use of the same biblical episodes as metaphors of contemporary events in iconophile literature; and, above all, the Byzantine perception of holy scripture, and especially the psalter, as a mirror of the daily conflict between good and evil which all Christians face in their struggle for salvation.

Maria Evangelatou holds a first degree in Archaeology (specialization in Byzantine Art) from the University of Ioannina, Greece (1993), and a Diploma in History of Art from the University of East Anglia (1995). She studied Museology and conservation of works of art at the Universitá Internazionale dell'Arte in Florence (1995-1997). She holds M.A. (1998) and Ph.D. s (2002) degrees in Byzantine Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, with a dissertation on the illustration of the ninth-century Byzantine marginal psalters. From 2000 to 2003 she worked as curatorial assistant in the Manuscript Department of the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens, and during the academic year 2003-2004 she held a Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship. Her scholarly interests are Byzantine manuscript illumination (with particular attention to the relationship of word and image), and symbolic aspects of Byzantine iconography (with particular attention to the relationship between ecclesiastical texts and the visual arts). Maria Evangelatou has published on the ninth-century Byzantine marginal psalters and on Marian iconography. [Last Updated 2004]

Program in Hellenic Studies and Department of Classics
Michael Paschalis - University of Crete; Visiting Scholar, Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation (U.S.A.) Seminars Program
Humanities Programs Building, Seminar Room 103
Cosponsored by the Program in Italian Studies