Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

(previous years)

Anthony Hirst is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King's College in London (2000-2003). He has also been awarded the Post-doctoral Research Fellowship in Byzantine and Modern Greek Literature in the Institute of Byzantine Studies at Queen's University in Belfast (2000-2002). He took his B.A. in theology and in English at the University of Cambridge in 1966. In 1994, he took an M.A. in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College from where he earned a Ph.D. in Modern Greek Literature in 1999. He has won various scholarships, including the Greek Government Scholarship and the British Academy Postgraduate Scholarship. His current projects include the completion of a book on Cavafy's Byzantine poems and editing a volume of conference papers on Alexandria. Recently published books include The Appropriation of Biblical and Liturgical Language in the Poetry of Palamas, Sikelianos, and Elytis and Alexandria, Real and Imagined (ed. Hirst and Michael Silk).

The Alexandrian Greek poet, C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933), is widely regarded as the most important of modern Greek poets. He is certainly the most widely translated, and is indeed one of the most translated of all twentieth-century poets. His work has influenced poets writing in many languages, and his reputation as a poet of world standing is now firmly established. Despite this, some of the resources for scholarship which one would expect to have in the case of such a major poet are still lacking, almost seventy years after Cavafy's death. It is only since 1994 that all of the poetry Cavafy himself left unpublished has been in the public domain. Many of the poet's notes and most of the correspondence in the Cavafy Archive remain unpublished; there is no comprehensive biography; and there is no critical edition, even of the most important group of his poems, the 154 'acknowledged' poems of the 'Canon.' There is a need for a new edition and the Princeton corpus of Cavafy collections provides an excellent basis for initiating research.

Nina Kassianou is a graduate of Pharmaceutical School in Pavia, Italy, and a photography critic for the Greek newspaper, To Vima. Currently, she is working towards a Ph.D. at Panteion University, Athens, Greece. Her publications include over 40 articles and criticism in To Vima.

Anastasia Stefanidou earned a Ph.D. in American Literature and Culture from Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece, with a dissertation entitled Ethnic and Diaspora Poets of Greek America. A B.A. in English was granted to her from the same University with honors in 1990. Scholarships she held include a Fulbright Scholarship in 1991 and yearly scholarships for academic excellence from the National Scholarship Foundation of Greece (1986-1990). She has a paper entitled "Creating a 'Third Home' in Diaspora: Reading Meena Alexander and Miranda Panaretou Cambanis" forthcoming in Literature on the Move: Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas.

Library Fellows - 2001-2002