PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies
Harold T. Shapiro (President Emeritus and Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Sevasti Trubeta (Institute of East European Studies, Free University of Berlin; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Angela Creager (Department of History)
Co-Sponsored by the Program in the History of Science
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Although eugenics has long been widely associated with National Socialism, recent research has shown that the eugenics movement and its ideas were embraced by a great number of countries world-wide. Looking back at the beginning of the twentieth century, it becomes clear that Greece was no exception to the trend of negotiating concepts of society and nation, in terms of eugenics. From at least the end of the 1910s until the 1970s, theories of eugenics and the introduction of eugenics-inspired measures, such as the sterilization of criminals or those deemed mentally or physically unfit and/or the establishment of the health certification of marriages, were discussed in Greece by a plurality of actors within politics, science, and the womens movement. Eugenics measures were never applied in Greece, at least not in a coherent and systematic fashion. The debate on eugenics was related to the perceived failure of society to modernize. Simultaneously, debates on eugenics often relied on concepts of the nation rooted in antiquity, claiming that the origins of eugenics should be traced to ancient Hellas.
Sevasti Trubeta (strubeta@princeton.edu) holds an M.A. in Sociology from the Humboldt University, Berlin, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1998 from the Faculty for Social Sciences. Between 2001 and 2003, she was a member of the research staff at the University of Freiburg i.Br. She has lectured at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (2003-04) and is currently a senior researcher at the Institute of East European Studies, Free University of Berlin. Her academic interests include theoretical and empirical research in the areas of minorities, Roma, migration, marginalization, nationalism, biologism and racism. Her current projects address Greek anthropological discourse in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as Roma migrants in Germany. Her latest book is entitled Constructing Ethnic Identities for the Muslims of Thrace: The Cases of the Pomaks and the Gypsies (in Greek, 2001).
9:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Colloquium Program and Abstracts
Colloquium Poster
MORNING SESSION
Chair: Dimitri Gondicas (Princeton University)
Introduction: Petre Guran (Princeton University)
"Third Rome" and "Crypto-empire": From history to historiography
George Majeska (University of Maryland)
Doesn't it lose something in the translation? Some Remarks on the Appropriation of Byzantine Culture in Russia
Nikos Chrissidis (Southern Connecticut State University)
Was there Byzantium after Byzantium? The Evidence from Russia in the Seventeenth Century
Molly Greene (Princeton University)
Greek Merchants and the Catholic Reformation
Petre Guran (Princeton University)
God explains to Patriarch Athanasios the fall of Constantinople: I. S. Peresvetov and the impasse of political theology
AFTERNOON SESSION
Chair: Slobodan Ćurčić (Princeton University)
Nikos Panou (Harvard University)
Emperor without empire: Rhetoric, power, ideology in late seventeenth-century Wallachia
Christine Philliou (Yale University)
Janus-faced or synthesis? Anatomy of a Phanariot-Ottoman ceremony
Jack Fairey (Princeton University)
Failed Nations and Usable Pasts: The Case of the Byzantine Union, 1844-1860s
Concluding Remarks: Paul Bushkovitch (Yale University)
Co-Sponsored by the Department of History, Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Program in European Cultural Studies, Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies
Elisabeth Yota (University of Fribourg; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Slobodan Ćurčić (Department of Art and Archaeology)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Since the early Christian period architecture has regularly figured as a subject across various media in Byzantine art. Byzantine artists represent architecture in diverse ways including both conventional, schematic renderings of the built environment, as well as more realistic depictions of specific buildings. What remains to be studied is the fact that these artists fail to pursue an accurate depiction of a "real" architectural model. Placed alternately in the background or foreground of compositions, architectural elements do not serve merely as "decorative elements" in order to fill empty space. Rather, it will be argued that architectural elements bring an additional reading level to compositions and, depending on the specific iconographical context, make it possible to identify topography or highlight the symbolic meaning of images.
Elisabeth Yota (eyota@princeton.edu) is Maître de Conférences in Byzantine Art at the University of Fribourg, where she has been teaching history of Byzantine art since 1999. She previously taught as Maître de Conférences Associi at the University of Strasbourg, 2003-04. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Sorbonne, Paris I, and the University of Fribourg in 2001, with a dissertation on "The Harley 1810 Four Gospels of the British Library: A Contribution to the Study of the Illustration of the Four Gospels from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century." She is currently completing for publication her book on The Harley 1810 Four Gospels and related manuscripts from the Palestine-Cypriot area. Her first book, Byzance: Une autre Europe, has just been published (Geneva: Infolio, 2006). Her research focuses on the production, use, and illustration of the Four Gospels during the middle Byzantine period, as well as on the interactions between the Four Gospels, lectionaries, and psalters. She has published on little known illuminated manuscripts and iconographical themes.
Roxani Margariti (Emory University; Institute for Advanced Study)
Respondent: Molly Greene (Department of History and Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
The established view of the pre-modern Indian Ocean maritime world evokes an essentially peaceful, cosmopolitan realm. Is this image accurate or is it partly the product of post-colonial nostalgia for a pre-colonial past? In the context of a larger project that reevaluates the structure of medieval mercantile networks in the western Indian Ocean, I explore hitherto neglected evidence for conflict and competition in the region. My point of departure is the changing relationship between the medieval port of Aden and its maritime foreland in the twelfth century. Control over maritime space and coastal territories, and ambivalent--even openly conflictual--relationships between maritime states constitute the two sides of a single coin, and offer valuable insights into the parameters of competition and into the very nature of these states and their communities of traders. In addition to countering the established reading of instances of conflict as utterly atypical of the Indian Ocean commercial world, I also question some medieval and modern historians' characterization of certain Indian Ocean states and groups as piratical, and offer a new reading of textual and material sources that conjures a geopolitical framework in which rival city states compete for resources, routes, and forelands long before the Portuguese brought their own variety of maritime violence to the Indian Ocean.
Roxani Margariti is Assistant Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University in Atlanta Georgia. She pursued higher education degrees in the United Kingdom (B.A., Western Asiatic Archaeology, University College London) and the United States (M.A., Nautical Archaeology, Texas A&M University), earning her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, 2002. Her research interests include maritime history and archaeology, Middle Eastern social and economic history, material culture, urban studies, and the history of commerce and maritime technology. She has participated in archaeological excavations and surveys in England, Greece, Turkey, Oman and the U.A.E., including such projects as the underwater excavation of the Bronze Age shipwreck at Ulu Burun, Turkey, and the Traditional Boats of Oman Project. She has served as assistant to the Curator of Islamic and East Asian Coins and Medals at the American Numismatic Society in New York, and as senior assistant and editor of medieval Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts in the Friedberg Geniza project at Princeton University's S.D. Goitein Laboratory for Geniza Research. Her book Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port is forthcoming (University of North Carolina Press: Fall 2006/Spring 2007).