Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

(previous years)
 

David Armstrong is Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Texas, Austin, where he taught from 1965-2005, guest-teaching also at Princeton and Stanford. He was educated at Princeton ('61) and UT (Ph.D), and has published on Horace (Horace, Yale UP 1989), Roman satire, and the interface between Roman poetry and Hellenistic philosophy; also on the Herculaneum papyri of the Epicurean philosopher and spiritual director Philodemus of Gadara (c. 110-30 bce), a friend of Cicero, Virgil and Horace. Three recent publications: on the life and social status of Horace (opening essay in The Blackwell Companion to Horace, 2010, ed. Gregson Davies; opening essay on Juvenal forthcoming in The Blackwell Companion to Juvenal and Persius, eds. Susanna Braund and Josiah Osgood); an edition of PHerc 1570, Cronache Ercolanesi 2011, comprising new text of Menander, Empedocles and Epicurus' as well as of Philodemus (On Riches); and a lead essay on Epicurean friendship and Roman politics in Epicurus and the Epicurean Tradition, Cambridge UP 2011, a volume of essays from a 2007 conference in his honor.

Georgios Deligiannakis is a Lecturer in Late Roman History at the Open University of Cyprus. He received his undergraduate degree in Classical Archaeology from the University of Athens. He pursued graduate studies at the University of Oxford where he was awarded his M.Phil. in Greek and Roman History and a D.Phil. with a dissertation on "The History and Archaeology of the Aegean Islands in Late Antiquity, A.D. 300-700: the Case of the Dodecanese" that examined the available evidence concerning the south-eastern Aegean in late antiquity and tried to see this region as part of a wider system of social and economic relations, political history, and material culture across the Later Roman Empire. He has published various articles on late antique archaeology, epigraphy, religion, and economic history and he was co-editor of The Aegean and its Cultures (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009), based on the first Oxford-Athens graduate student workshop organized by the Oxford University Greek Society and the Taylor Institution. In 2009 he was visiting research fellow at the Center for Epigraphical and Paleographical Studies, Ohio State University. He is currently editing a collection of Readings in Late Antiquity (Open University of Cyprus-Gutenberg, 2012); he is also working on late antique inscriptions from Cyprus and the systematic archaeological study of an Early Christian Basilica near Limassol, Cyprus. His current research project is to examine primary and secondary sources from the medieval and early modern period about the social and economic history of the eastern Aegean littorals.

Koen De Temmerman (B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Classics, 1999, 2001, 2006; M.A., Communication Sciences, 2002) specializes in Greek literature of the Roman Imperial period. He is currently a Post-doctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders at Ghent University (Belgium), where he has also been teaching ancient rhetoric and Greek literature since 2007. His research revolves around the notions of character and characterization in ancient Greek fictional and biographical literature, ancient rhetoric, physiognomy and literary theory. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on ancient Greek novels, among which forthcoming contributions to A Companion to the Ancient Novel (eds., E. Cueva & S. Byrne) and Space in Ancient Greek Literature (ed., I. de Jong). He has also co-edited volumes on biography and fictionality in the Greek literary tradition and Bakhtin's theory of the literary chronotope (2010). He is the recipient of the Triennial Prize for Humanities 2008, awarded by the Scholarly Foundation of Flanders for his doctoral dissertation on the ancient Greek novel. After long-term research stays as a graduate student at the Università degli Studi di Bologna and at Swansea University, Koen De Temmerman was awarded a Francqui Post-doctoral Fellowship of the Belgian American Educational Foundation at Stanford University, spent several terms at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, as a Visiting Member of the Classics Centre, and was a Visiting Lecturer at University College Cork.

Asa Eger is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His primary field is the archaeology of the Byzantine and Islamic Near East. His current research focuses on the formation and nature of the Byzantine-Early Islamic frontier from the 7-12^th centuries. He has participated in several surveys and excavations in the region of Antioch and Kahramamaraş in Turkey and has been directing excavations at the Early Islamic and Middle Byzantine frontier site of Hisn al-Tinat since 2006 (near modern Dortyol, Turkey). Eger was a Senior Fellow at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (Koç University, Istanbul) from 2008-2009 and will be a Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in the Spring of 2012. His first book, The Spaces Between the Teeth: A Gazetteer of Towns on the Islamic-Byzantine Frontier (Istanbul: Ege Yayınları), is currently in press. His second book-in-progress, The Islamic-Byzantine Frontier: Interaction and Exchange between Christian and Muslim Communities in the Early Islamic Period, studies the problem of the frontier as a militarized zone based solely on text-based viewpoints. The book considers cross-cultural interactions within a larger framework of the frontier as a landscape, examining its settlements, economic networks, and environmental history.

Georgia Flouda is a Curator at the Herakleion Archaeological Museum (Hellenic Ministry of Culture), where she contributes to the organization and research for the new exhibition project of the permanent collections. She has conducted numerous excavations on the Greek mainland (Argolid, Cyclades, Thebes, Achaea) and has supervised development projects of various Mycenaean sites (Achaea). She specializes in the art and archaeology of the Bronze Age Aegean, with a special focus on Aegean scripts. Her research interests center upon the cognitive aspects of Aegean writing systems, the administrative documents in Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B, as means for illuminating agency and socioeconomic patterns in Bronze Age Crete and the mainland as well as theoretical approaches to funerary practice. Her doctoral dissertation (University of Athens, 2006) was on “The administration of the collection and storage of goods in the mainland Mycenaean palace states.” Georgia Flouda is currently working on the publication of the material from the Middle Minoan Apesokari settlement and Tholos Tomb A in south-central Crete and on the politics involved in the excavation of this site during World War II.

Mihai-D. Grigore graduated in 1999 from Bucharest University, Department of Historical Theology and Byzantine History, and obtained his Ph.D. (2007) in Church History at Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nürnberg, with a dissertation on the semantics of honor in the Middle Ages West-Franconian society. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the "World Regions and Interactions: Area Studies and Transregionality" research group, University of Erfurt, with a project on the Wallachian Prince Neagoe Basarab (1512-1521). His research interests are in the area of historical and political anthropology (rituals, symbolic communication, semantics), Byzantine and Southeastern European history of ideas, and political philosophy before the Enlightenment.

Theodore Koutsogiannis is an art historian, currently serving as curator of the Hellenic Parliament Art Collection, Athens. His particular field of interest is the influence of Classical antiquity on the visual culture of modern Europe.  His Ph.D. dissertation (University of Athens) was on "The drawings of Cyriacus of Ancona and their influence on the antiquarianism and art of the Renaissance." He has also and studied at La Sapienza University, Rome; the Warburg Institute, London; the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa; and the Istituto di Studi Umanistici, Florence. He is co-editor of the Greek-language catalogue of the exhibition In the light of Apollo: Italian Renaissance and Greece (National Gallery, Athens 2004). He has taught History of Modern European Art at the University of Athens, the Hellenic Open University and the University of Thessaly.

Maria Oikonomou studied modern Greek and comparative literature as well as theater and Italian literary studies at the universities of Ioannina and Munich (magister artium). She received her PhD at the Aristotle University Thessaloniki (topic of thesis: “No Hero, No Song: Rewriting the Odyssey in the 20^th Century,” 2004). From 2001 to 2007 she worked as a lecturer at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Munich. Since 2008 she has held an assistant professorship at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, University of Vienna. Her main fields of research are myth in literature and culture, migration studies, comparative aesthetics, and literary / translation theory; her more recent publications include: Images of the Other: Migration and Exile in International Cinema (ed., 2009), “The Money from America: Migration, Capitalism, and Vampirism (article, 2011), “Photographs of Non-existent Places: The Album Odysséen of Bérard and Boissonas” (article, 2011) and Greek Dimensions of South Eastern European Culture (co-ed., 2011). Her current project (Transcribing Borders) deals with the aesthetic aspects of a “literature of migration.”

Angela Ralli is Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Philology, University of Patras, where she has founded and chairs the Laboratory of Modern Greek Dialects, the first of its kind in Greece. She received her B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Montreal, and has diplomas in French literature and Italian literature and civilization from the Universities of Grenoble and Perugia, respectively. Her main research area is the morphology of Greek and its dialects, particularly the morphology of Asia Minor dialects and Italiot. She deals with several theoretical issues of word formation and the relation of morphological change and language contact. Angela Ralli has over 120 publications, among which three monographs (two on general Greek morphology and one on compounding). She has directed several European projects, including one on Pontic, Cappadocian and Aivaliot. She has been an invited scholar at several European and American Universities, and has been awarded the Canadian Faculty Enrichment Award (1999), and the VLAC Research Fellowship of the Belgian Royal Academy (2008-2009 and 2013-2014). Angela Ralli is member of the editorial board of linguistic journals and member of the permanent scientific and organizing committee of the bi-annual Mediterranean Morphology Meeting and the International Conference of Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory.

Alessandra Ricci is Assistant Professor in the Department of Archaeology and History of Art at Koç University (Istanbul), where she also serves in the MA and PhD programs in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies. Her primary current research interests focus on a number of areas; the shape of the city of Constantinople and its suburbs in Late Antique and Byzantine times; the Anastasian Longwall, about which she is completing a monographic study with James G. Crow; perceptions of Byzantium in contemporary Turkey; and challenges in the conservation and management of cultural heritage in Turkey (with Thys-Şenocak, Koç University Press, forthcoming). Ricci is also the Director of the Küçükyalı ArkeoPark Project, a Byzantine period interdisciplinary urban archaeology research project based on the Asian side of Istanbul and focusing on the newly identified ninth-century patriarchal monastery of Satyros. Her current book project, Beyond Liminality: The Monastery of Satyros and Constantinople in the Ninth Century, analyzes the architecture, archaeology, spiritual life, and textual evidence of the monastic complex of Satyros. The study places in a more central and coherent position the role played by its patron, Patriarch Ignatios, while also examining contemporary Constantinopolitan events, polemics, and architectural undertakings. In addition, the project explores ways in which the materiality of the complex affected surrounding spaces and contributed to the definition of the hinterland of the capital city.

Evrydiki Sifneos is Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Neohellenic Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens, in the program of History of Enterprises and Industrial Archaeology. She is holds a doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Her interests focus on the economic and social history of the Aegean region and the history of the Greek diaspora in Russia. A scholar of business history and industrial archaeology, Evrydiki Sifneos has managed research projects in museums of material culture and is currently directing two projects: "Greek entrepreneurs in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov (19th-20th c.)" and "The olive-oil and soap-making industry in Greece (19th-20th c.)." Her most recent book is Greek Merchants in the Azov Sea: The Power and the Limits of a Family Enterprise (in Greek, 2009).

Gonda Van Steen earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in Classics in her native Belgium and a Ph.D. degree in Classics and Hellenic Studies from Princeton University. As the Cassas Chair in Greek Studies at the University of Florida, she teaches courses in ancient and modern Greek language and literature. Her research interests include classical drama, French travelers to Greece and the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth and twentieth-century receptions of the classics, Greek feminism, and contemporary Greek intellectual history. Van Steen's first book, Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece , was published by Princeton University Press in 2000 and was awarded the John D. Criticos Prize from the London Hellenic Society. In her book of 2010, Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire, revolutionary uses of Aeschylus' Persians (1820s) and The Venus de Milo take center stage. Van Steen recently published another book titled Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands (Oxford University Press, 2011), which discusses the ancient tragedies that were produced by the political prisoners of the Greek Civil War (late 1940s through 1950s).

Visiting Fellows 2010-2011
Visiting Fellows 2009-2010
Visiting Fellows 2008-2009
Visiting Fellows 2007-2008
Visiting Fellows 2006-2007
Visiting Fellows 2005-2006
Visiting Fellows 2004-2005
Visiting Fellows 2003-2004
Visiting Fellows 2002-2003
Visiting Fellows 2001-2002
Visiting Fellows 2000-2001