Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

AnneMarie Luijendijk (Department of Religion)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

A collection of third century papyrus documents from the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus allows us to witness the every day activities of the local bishop and the Christian community. Drawing on this bishop’s correspondence as well as on the writings of his famous contemporaries and colleagues such as Origen and Cyprian, we encounter the bishop, addressed as papas Sotas, actively involved in education, networking, travel and some other business.

AnneMarie Luijendijk joined the faculty at Princeton last fall as Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion. She specialized in New Testament at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, The Divinity School, in 2005. A scholar of New Testament and Early Christianity and a papyrologist, she is interested in the social history of early Christianity, using both literary texts and documentary sources. Her book Greetings in the Lord: Christian Identity and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri will be published through Harvard University Press in the fall of this year. She is working on the publication of a 6th century Coptic manuscript containing Christian oracles. Other research includes a project on the use and disuse of biblical manuscripts in the early Church.

Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Courses and Independent Work: Classical Tradition, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies

Summer Opportunities in Greece: Language Study, Thesis Research, Excavations, Internships

Information for earning a certificate in Hellenic Studies.

Light refreshments will be served.

Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Zoe deGroot Hoster '09, Ju Hea Kim '09, Jack D. O'Connor '07, Matthew J. Prisco '09, Omer Ziyal '08
Graduate Students: Giada Damen (Art & Archaeology), Leslie Ann Geddes (Art & Archaeology), Johanna D. Heinrichs (Art & Archaeology), Chen Liu (Art & Archaeology), Matthew J. Milliner (Art & Archaeology), Cecilia Elena Ramos (Architecture), Yueyuan Zheng (Architecture)
with Patricia Fortini Brown (Department of Art and Archaeology)

"Venice and the Mediterranean" is a course focusing on the art and architecture of Venice's Mediterranean empire, known as the stato da mar, from its beginnings in 1204 to the loss of Crete in 1669 and beyond. Please join the class as they followed the Venetian Lion of St. Mark on a 10-day trip to Crete during spring recess and tracked the changing artistic and cultural geography of the island as it went from Byzantine to Venetian to Ottoman rule.

<Posted on 03/22/2007 11:02>

Main Gallery, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library
Contents

Website and program
Place: Nassau Presbyterian Church
Open to the public: free admission.

The Deparment of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in cooperation with Beth Mardutho's Dorushe Graduate Student Association is pleased to announce the 2007 Dorushe Graduate Student Syriac Studies Conference. This year's conference will be held at Princeton University. In addition to graduate student papers, Dr. David Taylor, Oxford University, will deliver keynote remarks. Current graduate students and recent MA or PhD recipients are invited to join us for this event. Pre-registration is required. Conference Information

Tim Weyrich, Benedict Brown, Corey Toler-Franklin, Diego Nehab, Thomas Funkhouser, Szymon Rusinkiewicz
Department of Computer Science
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

The archaeological site of Akrotiri on the island of Thera (modern-day Santorini) has proven a treasure trove of information about prehistoric Aegean civilization and culture. Among the most valued excavation finds are wall paintings (frescoes), which have been preserved in the volcanic ash since the sixteenth century BCE. However, the frescoes, are typically recovered in fragments of a few centimeters to a few tens of centimeters in length, and reconstructing complete wall sections from the fragments occupies a major portion of the effort at Akrotiri. As part of a joint Computer Science/Hellenic Studies graduate seminar, students and post-doctoral fellows are building a system that will assist archaeologists by digitizing excavated fragments and automatically proposing matches on the basis of color, 3-D shape, and other cues. This will allow for a more rapid and more complete reconstruction of the wall paintings, with less handling of the physical fragments. In this presentation, we will report on our recent trip to Akrotiri, sponsored by the Program in Hellenic Studies, and we will describe our initial meetings with the conservators and archaeologists there. We will talk about the current state of the frescoes and how they are reconstructed and conserved, as well as our ideas for building computer-based tools to help the process.

Katerina Seraidari (Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Room 103, Scheide Caldwell House, Princeton University

In his historical study of the French-Spanish boundary, Peter Sahlins (1989) termed "political amphibians" those who sought to navigate between the demands of different national loyalties. In the beginning of the twentieth century, P. Zerlentis, a local historian of Syros, also referred to Tzouannes Anapliotis as an "amphibian." Anapliotis was an Orthodox notable of Naxos who lived in the seventeenth century: he supported the Capuchins economically from the very beginning of their arrival in Naxos, and he lived for thirty years in their monastery. While he considered himself a Greek Orthodox and on his deathbed asked for an Orthodox priest to give him the last Communion, he asked to be buried in a Capuchin habit in the Capuchin cemetery. The paper will examine other, similar present-day devotional practices that reproduce ambiguity and confusion, while refusing to consider religious and national identity as a well-limited and unchanged entity.

Katerina Seraïdari studied Modern Greek History at the University of Athens before completing a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (2000) with a three-year research grant from the Rectorat de Paris. A reworked version of her dissertation, Le culte des icônes en Grèce, was published in French by the Presses Universitaires du Mirail (Toulouse, 2005). Katerina Seraidari taught social anthropology for three years at the University of Toulouse and is currently an associate member of the Centre d’anthropologie de Toulouse. She is the author of a book in Greek, entitled "May her grace be with us!" Devotional practices and ideological conflicts in the Cyclades (Athens, forthcoming 2007).

Pavlos Kalligas (University of Athens; Visiting Professor, Council of the Humanities, Princeton University)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

In his short stories Georgios Vizyenos appears to be making use of a variety of images derived from the work of Plato. This may be in part due to the influence of German Romanticism, however there are instances where a more direct impact of the reading of specific Platonic texts can be discerned. In this paper one such case will be examined as a case in point: "The Consequences of the Old Story," one of Vizyenos' more complex and elaborate works, seems to depend heavily on the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, from which much of its imagery and, furthermore, some of its basic structural features are inspired. This can be used as a basis in order to appreciate better the complexity of Vizyenos' narrative strategies in general.

Pavlos Kalligas is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Athens, where he teaches Ancient Philosophy in the Department of Methodology, History and Theory of Science. His research and publications focus on Neoplatonism and especially Plotinus. Editor-in-Chief of the philosophical review Deucalion and Researcher at the Academy of Athens, Kalligas is preparing a complete edition of the Enneads of Plotinus, with modern Greek translation and commentary (four volumes have appeared to-date). Currently an Old Dominion Fellow in Classical Philosophy at Princeton, he is teaching a graduate seminar on Plotinus' theory of the soul.

An interdisciplinary review of current debates.
All sessions are in Dickinson Hall, room 211.
Colloquium Information

Irene Martín-Cortés (Autonomous University of Madrid; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Following the transitions to democracy in Greece, Spain, and Portugal during the 1970s, scholars have referred to the "third wave democracies of Southern Europe" as a region with common historical, social and political characteristics. However, during the 1980s, several public opinion surveys brought to light a peculiar aspect of Greek political culture that the comparative politics literature could not account for. Along with a feeling of political cynicism - common to Greece, Spain and Portugal – Greeks manifested an extraordinary and unexpectedly high interest in politics, while the opposite was the case for the Spaniards and the Portuguese. The case of Greece became even more puzzling as interest in politics – an attitude that supposedly is highly resistant to change - decreased steeply during subsequent years. The talk will focus on the comparison of different aspects of the recent political history of Greece and Spain, in an attempt to identify the respective factors that account for the rise and fall in interest in politics observed during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Irene Martín-Cortés is Lecturer in Political Science at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the Autonomous University of Madrid (AUM). A recipient of fellowships from the Juan March Institute, as well as from the Onassis Foundation, she wrote her doctoral dissertation on "The meanings and origins of interest in politics in two new democracies: Spain and Greece" (AUM, 2004). Her publications in English include: "Interest in Politics and the Political Culture Approach: The Case of the New Democracies of Southern and Eastern Europe", in Pollack, D. et al. (eds.), Political Culture in Post-Communist Europe - Attitudes in New Democracies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) and (with Jan van Deth) "Political Involvement" in Westholm, A., van Deth, J. y Montero, J.R. (eds.), Citizenship, Involvement, Democracy. Volume B: Population Studies (London: Routledge, 2006).