PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies
Averil Cameron(University of Oxford; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Questions have recently been asked about the levels of toleration and intolerance both in late antiquity and Byzantium, and these issues are inseparable from any consideration of the development and enforcement of Orthodoxy in Byzantine society. This paper considers some of the mechanisms which were employed in Byzantium in order to condemn or suppress writings and language considered to be heterodox - from book burning to anathematization - and asks how and why this apparently authoritarian discourse developed, and how effective it actually was.
Averil Cameron (amcamero@princeton.edu) received her first degree from Oxford and her Ph.D. from the University of London. She taught Greek and Roman, and subsequently Byzantine, History at King's College London from 1965 to 1994, with stays at Columbia University (1967-68), the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1977-78) and Berkeley (Sather Lectures, 1986). She is the founding Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King's College London. Averil Cameron moved to Oxford to become Warden of Keble College (an administrative position) in 1994. She is a co-editor of vols. XII-XIV of Cambridge Ancient History and was chair from 1997 to 2005 of the Prosopography of the Byzantine World (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/PBE/). Her books include Procopius and the Sixth Century (1985) and Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (1991).
Peter Jeffery (Department of Music)
010 East Pyne
Co-sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies and the Program in Hellenic Studies
May Chehab (Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Carol Rigolot (Department of French and Italian)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
The evolution of the concept of the Mediterranean sea mirrors that of the reception of Greek antiquity in European literature during the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1880s, Europeans started to question their classical heritage, especially the obligatory veneration that accompanied it. In the process of examining antiquity, modern writers also reassessed the Mediterranean, deconstructing its previously admired attributes and reconstructing them differently. This talk will explore the reception of antiquity in several French writers -- Loti, Claudel, Montherlant, Morias, Apollinaire -- to show how, in and through their works, the Mediterranean, which had been an (en)closed sea, is transformed into a poetic universality. The main example will be the Nobel Prize-winning French modernist poet, Saint-John Perse (1887-1976). In 1946 he began his poem "Winds" with a seemingly canonical dedication: "Pour Atlanta et Allan P." This ordinary looking phrase actually contains a whole poetic program: Saint-John Perse is not only dedicating the poem to himself, but is also joining a long literary tradition extending from Solon's elegies to Whitman's Song of Myself. In the process, he proclaims the "Atlanticity" of his poetic identity and of the new textual sea that came to replace the Mediterranean.
May Chehab (mchehab@princeton.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Cyprus. She majored in French Literature, as well as English and American Literature, at the University of Athens (1983) before specializing in Philosophy and Comparative Literature. She earned her Doctorat in 1999 at the Universiti de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, with a dissertation on "Saint-John Perse et la Grhce." She also holds a degree on Political Institutions and Constitutional Law from the University of Paris-IV. May Chehab's research interests focus on new autobiography, the reception of Pre-Socratic philosophy in modern French Literature and the interaction between literature and science.
Lidia Santarelli (Hannah Seeger Davis Post-Doctoral Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent (Jan Gross, Department of History)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
The experience of the Italian occupation in Greece has been generally neglected by scholars who have dealt with the history of the Second World War and of Europe under Axis occupation. The talk will call into question the conventional view of Italian expansionism as an imperialism with a human face, and it will place the Fascist project of a New Order for the Mediterranean and the Balkans in its contemporary historical context. The main focus will be on the Fascist conception of war as an instrument for the manipulation of political and ethnic borders, and as a means of economic exploitation of occupied territories. The paper will consider the impact of the Italian occupation on Greek society, by focusing on the military violence and its meanings.
Lidia Santarelli (lsantare@princeton.edu) completed her Ph.D. in History and Civilization at the European University Institute, Florence, with a dissertation on the Italian occupation in Greece during the Second World War. A member of the Research Project on "The Impact of Nazi and Fascist Rule in Europe, 1938-1950," sponsored by the European Science Foundation, she has taught (2002-2005) contemporary history at the University La Sapienza Rome, where she has developed several courses on war and conflicts in the twentieth century. Between 2003 and 2005 she also taught history of South-Eastern Europe at the University of L'Aquila, Italy. Her main areas of interest are: war, civil war and ethnic conflicts; nation building and nation state in thes Balkans; Fascist culture and ideology; military violence, war crimes, systems of occupation. She has published extensively on topics related to her research activity.
Pinelopi Stathi (Center for Medieval and Modern Hellenism, Academy of Athens;Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Heath Lowry (Near Eastern Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
The letter series "Correspondence of the Great Dragomans, 1671-1797," kept in the National Library of Greece, is a rich source of historical evidence for the eighteenth century, since the persons involved are the Greek Patriarchs of Jerusalem, living mostly in Constantinople, and the well known Great Dragomans of the Ottoman Empire. The letters shed light on the cultural, political, and ideological movements of the time. The work-in-progress consists of the composition of abstracts for all the letters, as well as the indexation of all the names and the annotation of the most important events mentioned. The letters provide a narrative for major contemporary political events, known from various other sources, and vividly described by their protagonists.
Pinelopi Stathi (pstathi@princeton.edu), Director of Research at the Research Center for Medieval and Modern Hellenism of the Academy of Athens, was born in Istanbul and educated in the Zappeion High School. She graduated from the University of Lund, Sweden, with an M.A. degree in Classics and Modern Greek, and she earned her Ph.D. in History at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1993. Her research focuses on cultural relations between Orthodox Christians and Ottoman dignitaries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In her book Chrysanthos Notaras, Patriarch of Jerusalem (1707-1731): Precursor of the Greek Enlightenment, Athens, 2000 (in Greek) she explores the ideological movements of the Greek re'bybs within the Ottoman world, their initiatives to establish schools and publishing houses, as well as their practices in the copying and distribution of books and manuscripts.
Chryssa Maltezou (Director, Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies, Venice; Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation (USA) Visiting Scholar)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
The Greek Confraternity in Venice, founded in 1498, is the oldest and most important community of the Hellenic diaspora. Its history presents considerable interest from many points of view, mostly because the confraternity functioned as the center of the Greek nation in exile. After the Second World War, when Greece decided to found a research center in Venice under the name "Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies," the Greek community, which numbered then only a few members, ceded to the new cultural foundation all its property together with its artistic, printed, and archival treasures. The lecture focuses on the history of the Greek presence in the city of Saint Mark, including the Hellenic Institute and its treasures: printed books, archives, and icons.
Chryssa Maltezou is the Director of the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice and Professor of History at the University of Athens. She is the author of numerous publications on various aspects of Venetian-Byzantine relations, as well as on the history of Greece under Latin rule. Her books include Crete during Venetian Domination: 1211-1669 (in Greek); The Venetian Presence in Kythera (in Greek); Venice of the Greeks; Engravings from the Hellenic Institute in Venice (in Greek); and ire debeas in rettorem Caneae. The Order of the Venetian Doge to the Rector of Chania (in Greek).
Konstantinos Papageorgiou (University of Athens; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Wilhelm von Humboldt has remarked that ideas of one generation sometimes fail to impress their time, live a clandestine life for quite a while, and fall into oblivion only to be recalled to life by a later generation. In a sense this could be the case with a text written by the eminent historian Nikos Svoronos - Genesis and Formation of the Greek Nation. The text was written in the early sixties and it was conceived as an article for a "Historical Encyclopedia of Modern Hellenism." Regrettably, the project failed to realize because of the dictatorship imposed in 1967. Thirty years later an Athens publisher finally decided to launch the text in the form of a small book, which set off a heated dispute among Greek scholars. This paper will give a rough idea of the book's main tenets, will present what the disputants thought about the book and about each other, and will finally attempt to articulate an argument in favor of an explicitly normative approach to nationalism.
Konstantinos Papageorgiou (kpapageo@princeton.edu) received his law degree from the University of Athens and his Dr. jur from the University of Munich. Since 1996 he has taught philosophy of law at the University of Athens, Faculty of Law. His publications include Harm and Punishment, Baden-Baden, 1994 (in German), and The Political Possibility of Justice, Athens, 1994 (in Greek). Autonomy and Responsibility, a book of essays on legal, moral and political philosophy, is currently being prepared. He has worked on the philosophy of criminal law, Kantian and utilitarian ethics, applied ethics, political philosophy with a special interest in Rawlsian theory, normative issues of nationalism and multiculturalism. He has edited and introduced Greek translations of works by important American moral philosophers. His more recent interests lie in the philosophy of international relations, the morality of war, and aspects of international distributive justice.
Cosponsored by the Program in Hellenic Studies
Symposium program: http://www.princetonartmuseum.org/Homer_Symposium.pdf
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Information: http://www.princetonartmuseum.org/homerlinks.htm
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