PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies
Yiorgos Kalogeras (University of Thessaloniki; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
58 Prospect Avenue, Room 101
Scholarly studies of the Greek presence in the United States, produced in the course of the twentieth century, base their argument primarily on a distinction between the concepts of 'diaspora' and 'immigration.' Historians, anthropologists, journalists, and literary critics perceive Greek immigration as an event that sets in motion the creation of a post-ethnic identity among the immigrants. The argument goes that upon arrival in America, the Greeks came face to face with an industrial reality quite unfamiliar to them in their home country. This industrial reality was a consequence of modernity and modernization and gave rise to a class consciousness among the immigrants, which in turn expedited their assimilation within American society. This talk will analyze and criticize such claims and will argue for a less linear relation between immigration and assimilation, as well as a more nuanced relation between diaspora and immigration.
YIORGOS KALOGERAS (gkaloger@princeton.edu) is Professor of American ethnic and minority studies in the Department of American Literature and Culture, University of Thessaloniki. He is the founder of the Hellenic Association of American Studies and co-founder of Gramma: A Journal of Theory and Criticism. He has edited a volume of essays under the title Nationalism and Sexuality: Crises of Identity, and a volume of essays on Toni Morrison; he has also edited the first collection of short stories to be published by a Greek in the United States, Konstantinos Kazantzes' Histories tes Patridos Mou. Since 1985, he has published a number of articles on Greek-American Studies in American and Greek journals.
Dale Kinney (Bryn Mawr College)
211 Dickinson Hall
Oleksander Halenko (National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine; Kiev Mohlya Academy; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
RESPONDENT: Molly Greene (History and Hellenic Studies)
This talk focuses on cultural interaction between the Greek communities of the Northern Pontic region and the Turkic peoples, from the thirteenth through the eighteenth century, as reflected in the personal names of Greeks in the Crimea. This was the period when the Northern Pontic Greeks, otherwise known as Urums, changed their spoken language to a Tatar dialect. As the sources covering this last period of the Greek presence in the Crimea (before their deportation to the Northern shore of the Azov Sea in 1779) are very scarce, the list of tax-payers among the Greek Orthodox Christians Communities provided by the Ottoman tax-register from 1542 helps us trace when this transition took place and why.
OLEKSANDER HALENKO (ohalenko@princeton.edu) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Political and Ethnic Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of the Ukraine and Assistant Professor of History at the Kiev Mohyla Academy. His interests cover a wide range of topics, including the history of nomads in Eastern Europe, and the Italian colonies and Ottoman provinces in the Northern Black Sea. Currently, he is completing a book on "Eastern Europe in the International Slave Trade from the Earliest Times till the End of the Eighteenth Century."
Oleg Grabar (Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art, Emeritus, Harvard University; Professor Emeritus, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ)
Betts Auditorium, School of Architecture
Department of Comparative Literature, Works-in-Progress Colloquium
Constanze Güthenke (Post-doctoral Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
105 Bobst Hall
Richard M. Economakis (University of Notre Dame)
Room 101, 58 Prospect
More than ever before, Aegean island communities are threatened by speculative development, the pressures of a global economy, and by ignorant, if innocent, attempts by newly-prosperous locals and emigre islanders to invest in their ancestral towns as a matter of pride. The potential for an irreparable devolution of the architectural quality of Aegean island settlements exists, despite the efforts of the Greek Ministry of the Environment to ensure that new interventions follow the local traditional model; for, with so many departures from the island's traditional vocabulary of forms having already been effected since the establishment of a tourist economy in the 1950s, there is much confusion as to what exactly that model is. The confusion arises in large part because of the absence of comprehensive studies on the character of traditional Aegean architecture. At the same time, constructional and aesthetic considerations around the world have changed so radically and with such negative results in the last half-century as to ensure that even the most painstaking efforts to vest new buildings with a 'genuinely' local character appear to be clumsy and unrefined. There is also some apprehension about requiring builders to maintain a traditional character in new Aegean island constructions; some argue that the building laws become a kind of 'picturesque straightjacket;' yet they fail to appreciate that the interest in protecting the vernacular settlements is not grounded in a romantic affectation for an 'older' architecture and urbanism and the interests of the tourist industry; rather, it recognizes, on the one hand, the traditional towns and their architectural forms as superior from an urban and formal standpoint, and on the other hand, acknowledges them as the only truly indigenous creations of the place. The speaker's intent is to encourage new construction in the Aegean islands (as anywhere else) to ally itself creatively and respectfully to the cultural, constructional, and environmental raisons d'jtre of the local traditional vocabulary of forms.
RICHARD M. ECONOMAKIS is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He received his graduate and undergraduate degrees at Cornell University, and has been a registered architect in Greece since 1987. He worked with Porphyrios Associates, London, from 1990 to 1995, and briefly re-joined the firm in the spring of 2002 as Associate for the design of Princeton University's new Whitman College. He has taught at the University of Notre Dame since 1996, and has served as the School of Architecture's Interim Director of Graduate Studies. In May 2002 he was voted 'Educator of the Year' by Notre Dame's American Institute of Architecture Students. His experience also includes a number of years as editor of architectural titles at Academy Editions, London, during which time he edited the books Acropolis Restoration (1994; Special Mention, Runciman Foundation Awards), Building Classical: A vision of Europe and America (1993), and wrote monographs on the works of architects Leon Krier and Quinlan Terry. His most recent book is Nisyros: History and Architecture of an Aegean Island (Melissa: Athens, 2001). His professional work has been published in numerous architectural journals and exhibited in international exhibitions. Most recently, he was one of six finalists in the international competition organized by the Seaside Institute for the design of a gateway to the new town of Seaside, Florida.