Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

Exhibition Opening Reception, April 24, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Eighteenth Century Window-Main Gallery, Firestone Library
The exhibition will be on view April 22 - May 12, 2009.

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Hellenic Studies/School of Architecture Lecture
Yannis Aesopos (University of Patras, Greece; Visiting Research Fellow, Program for Hellenic Studies)
School of Architecture, Room 107

Urban transformations of postwar Athens: from the repetition of the small-to-medium-scale building type of the polykatoikia (multi-apartment building) to the post-Olympics 2004 diffusion to the surrounding Attica region. Selected architectural and urban projects by Yannis Aesopos will be presented within this context.

Yannis Aesopos is an architect in Athens, Associate Professor, University of Patras, Greece and currently a Visiting Research Fellow, Program for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University.  [last updated 2009]

Mathieu Grenet (European University Institute, Florence; Hellenic Studies Library Research Grant Fellow)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Owing to their physical and cultural location at the interface of two worlds, the communities of the Greek diaspora have been consistently regarded as having lived a singular "experience of the Ottoman rule." Supposedly deemed safe from the "corruption" of the Ottoman yoke, diaspora communities came to be celebrated as the conservatories of the Greek national identity, as well as the unerring supporters of the Neohellenic state to come. And if such a view has been in turn criticized for being oversimplifying, little work has been done yet to show how diaspora Greeks themselves dealt with their own "Ottoman-ness" - namely the fact that most of them had remained subjects of the Sultan, and kept close relations with relatives and associates living in the Ottoman empire. This complex phenomenon will be addressed through the study of the political discourses and practices at stake in various communities of the Greek diaspora - with special reference to the case of Marseilles. It will be argued that far from being exceptional, the "Ottoman experience" constituted a common feature of the life of these communities, and that the Greeks coped with it in many different ways, involving both cooperation and conflict. Eventually, this paper will address the role played by historiography in the later "externalization of the Ottoman heritage," and the way this contribution informed the efforts subsequently made at defining "Greek-ness."

Mathieu Grenet is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute, Florence. His dissertation deals with the comparison of three communities of the Greek diaspora - namely those Venice, Livorno and Marseille - between the 1770S and the 1830s. A former junior lecturer at the University of Lyon 2, France, he has taught for three years (2003-2006) European and French modern history, while appointed as associate researcher in programs on historical demography and urban history. Author of several articles, he has published on the social and political history of the communities of the Greek diaspora, as well as on other issues such as migratory networks and the Levant trade. He is currently co-editing a volume on colonial and world history (Orb and Sceptre: Global and Imperial Histories, forthcoming), and is co-organizing a panel on "Migrant Communities and Urban Space in the Mediterranean ports, 17th-19th centuries" for the 10th International Conference on Urban History, to be held in Ghent, Belgium, in September 2010.  [last updated 2009]

Hugo Meyer (Department of Art and Archaeology)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

During the decades following Daguerre's invention that bear the stamp of the nationalist developments linked to the year 1848, "Greece" was a Janus-like concept. On the one hand it referred to the political entity that had barely emerged from 400 years of foreign domination, while on the other it symbolized a utopian venue with disparate forms of intellectual citizenship. And quite like the incursions and conquests of the Turks had once barred the land routes to India and thus lent spark to the Age of Discovery, the liberation of Greece, which had made travel possible, occasioned mental entrepreneurs to foray from the Greece of the mind into the country itself. While Goethe's Iphigenia of 1787 had still been searching the land of the Greeks with her soul, photographers, like other intellectuals, in the aftermath of Daguerre visited the unfettered domain for the purpose of finding proof of their lingering ideals in the physical remains of the Hellas of yore. However, to educated Greeks and their interpretations of history's course, 1821 had, first and foremost, amounted to the re-emergence of a river that, like the Danube, had flown underground for awhile. Thus, the perception of things from within Greece could not but be different from what conditioned the mindsets of the affectionate foreigners. Dimitris Konstantinou's artistic eminence is predicated upon his patriotic belief in his nation's inherent vigor and virtues, and his awareness of living in a time of profound change that, in tandem with the restoration of Greece's ethnic self-esteem, required adapting to the dynamics of the industrial age. Among Western photographers figuring in the presentation, Félix Bonfils will be featured, including four unpublished images made during the Beirut-based Frenchman's first, little known Athenian campaign.

Hugo Meyer (hmeyer@Princeton.EDU) is Professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology, teaching at Princeton since 1989. He has been a Reisestipendiat of the German Archaeological Institute, worked for The Bavarian National Museum, and taught at Marburg, Munich and Graz universities in Germany and Austria. Research fellowships from the Humboldt and Alexander S. Onassis foundations have allowed him to spend extended research periods in Greece. He has written extensively on ancient art from the Archaic to the Early Christian period. Among his books are monographs on Medea and the Peliads, Antinoüs, and imperial cameos and state monuments, the latter forming vol. I of a History of Roman Art in Case Studies, vols. II and III just having been readied for the press. Also awaiting publication are book-length manuscripts on theologian and homme de lettres David Friedrich Strauß' Munich years, The Female's Lot and Deities of Marriage in Greek and Roman Pictorial Narratives, and Interpretations of the Past: An Art History of Photography in Athens between 1839 and 1875.  [last updated 2009]

Scheide Caldwell House - Room 103

Angelos Delivorrias (Benaki Museum; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: William Childs (Department of Art and Archaeology)
Room 103, Scheide Caldwell House

Greek ‘folk’ art has been extensively undervalued on the basis of its generally accepted decorative character, although both its surviving material and its content have yet to attract a systematic scholarly approach. Apart from a considerable number of coffee-table editions, the lack of focused monographs, specialized articles and descriptive catalogs is indeed suggestive. It is, therefore, tempting to understand from this particular point of view its elusive definitions either as ‘folk’ or ‘popular,’ ‘traditional,’ ‘post-Byzantine,’ or ‘neohellenic.’ While emphasizing the secular overtones of ‘folk art’ objects, the paper will stress their complementary relation to their contemporary and thoroughly studied ecclesiastical art, despite the fact that the links between them remain to be located and identified. The approach to central problems related to the iconographic repertory - such as the space and time of the representations, narrative forms and symbolic meanings, historicity and aesthetic expression - is bound to oscillate between the need for primary research and the demand to cement the latter's results on a solid theoretical basis. This unavoidable oscillation forms the methodological principle underlying the treatment of the proposed research, whose primary goal will be to train both visual and mental perception in understanding the riddles of an essentially unexplored form of artistic expression.

Angelos Delivorrias, art historian and archaeologist, is the Director of the Benaki Museum in Athens. He has studied in Thessaloniki, Athens, Freiburg, Paris, and Tübingen, where he received his Ph.D. degree. He has taught at the University of Athens, lectured extensively in Greece and abroad and published a considerable number of articles, essays, catalogue entries and monographs, including the Architectural Decoration of Classical Temples, the entry ‘Aphrodite’ for the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythological Classicae, and The Parthenon Frieze. His other books and articles cover a broad range of different topics in ancient, post-Byzantine and modern Greek art. For his contributions in different cultural fields he has been honored by the French and Italian governments (respectively, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 1999; Comendatore Ordine della Stella della Solidarieta' Italiana, 2008), by the Hellenic Republic (Commander of the Order of the Phoenix, 2000), by the Academy of Athens (silver medal, 2000). A member of the Academia Europea, the German Archaeological Institute and the Greek Archaeological Society, he was awarded the title the International Man of the Year (1996) by the International Biographical Centre.  [last updated 2009]

Oswyn Murray (Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford)

211 Dickinson Hall Reception to follow

Co-sponsored by the Program in the Ancient World and the Program in Hellenic Studies

Reading packets are available in the Departments of History and Classics or by contacting Kevin Kalish at kkalish@princeton.edu

Kostas Yiavis (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

The workshop will offer an overview of the development of Greek hands to early prints. We shall discuss ways to describe codexes as cultural phenomena. Also explored will be how technologies of reading bear on the strategies of modern editors.

Sponsored by the Program in Hellenic Studies and the Group for the Study of Late Antiquity

Julia Chatzipanagioti-Sangmeister (University of Cyprus; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Constanze Güthenke (Department of Classics)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

An important set of texts of modern Greek Literature during the age of Enlightenment is the so-called 'Phanariot Poetry,' a long neglected and underestimated corpus of poems and songs written mostly in the years 1750-1821. Some of these texts are known through contemporary editions, but most of this poetry has been preserved only in manuscript collections kept mainly in libraries in Greece and Romania. The talk will outline the historical context of their production, trace their tradition and try to define characteristics of language, form and content. The aim is to argue for a revision of the term 'Phanariot Poetry' and to propose a new approach and interpretation of these texts that pre-date the Greek War of Independence.

Julia Chatzipanagioti-Sangmeister is associate professor of modern Greek Literature at the University of Cyprus. She received her first degree from the University of Athens and her Ph.D. in modern Greek literature from the University of Vienna. She taught at the University of Bonn (1997-2002) before joining the University of Cyprus in 2002. Her area of specialization is modern Greek Literature, 1700-1833, with an emphasis on the age of Enlightenment. Among her publications are Graecia Mendax (Vienna 2002) and Griechenland, Zypern, Balkan und Levante (Eutin 2006), an annotated bibliography of eighteenth century travel literature on the Ottoman Empire. Her latest book is an edition of an unpublished manuscript of Eugenios Voulgaris, the Account of Crimea (Athens, 2008). She has recently completed a book-length study on Greek freemasons with a German background in the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Her research interests include book history, history of ideas, bibliography, and textual editing.  [last updated 2009]

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