PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies
Florin Curta (University of Florida; Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Despite an increasing number of archaeological finds pertaining to the seventh and early eighth century in Greece, as well as in other regions of the Balkans, the now over fifty-year old Setton-Charanis controversy has brought historians into a cul-de-sac. To overcome the impasse, this paper offers a plausible synthesis on the basis of rather heterogeneous materials. I will first examine issues of chronology raised by the now fairly abundant archaeological evidence. Administrative and political changes will also be discussed in the second part in relation to the evidence of coins and seals. The third part of this paper presents the evidence of written sources. Issues of chronology and naming are the theme of that section. The forms of military and political organization in "Dark-Age" Greece are the focus of the last section, as various strands of evidence will be brought into a final conclusion.
Florin Curta is an associate professor of medieval history and archaeology at the University of Florida, and currently a member of the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. He received his Ph.D. in history from Western Michigan University (1998) and has published several studies on the archaeology, numismatics, and early medieval history of Southeastern and Eastern Europe. His book, Making the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, ca. 500-700 (Cambridge, 2001) won the Herbert Baxter Adams Award of the American Historical Association in 2003. Curta is also the author of Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500-1250 (Cambridge, 2006), and the editor of two collections of studies: Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis. Frontiers in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2005); and East Central and Eastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor, 2005). The latter has been named a 2006 Choice Outstanding Academic Title in History, Geography, and Area Studies. Curta is currently working on a manuscript entitled Greece in the Early Middle Ages (ca. 500-ca. 1050). An Economic and Social Perspective, and on a collection of studies entitled The Other Europe: Avars, Bulgars, Khazars, and Others, to be published by Brill.
Dimitris Papadimitriou (University of Manchester; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
What are the limits to Europeanization? This paper explores the impact of the European Union's agenda of structural reform on Greece. Despite the manifested pro-Europeanism of the Greek political elite, the country has apparently struggled to adapt to the competitive pressures emanating from Greece's membership in the European Union and, more recently, the euro-zone. By linking the Greek case to the literature on 'varieties of capitalism' and Europeanization, the paper explores why the domestic system has so often resisted adaptation in important economic areas such as privatization, labour market regulation, and pensions. Its findings raise questions about Greece's 'governability,' the structural features of Greek capitalism, as well as the European Union's ability to impose economic reform on its member states.
Dimitris Papadimitriou (dpapadim@Princeton.EDU) is Lecturer in European Politics at the University of Manchester and a Visiting Fellow at the Hellenic Observatory of the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has written on contemporary Greek politics and the European Union's relations with Eastern Europe (Negotiating the New Europe, Ashgate 2002). He has previously published on the EMU (European Monetary Unification) and welfare state reform and on the Greek strategy during the negotiations of the Maastricht Treaty in 1990-91. More recently he has been working on the theme of Europeanization and its effects on the process of domestic structural reform: privatization, labour market reform and pensions.
Co-authored with Kevin Featherstone, his forthcoming book on EU membership and Greek public policy (Palgrave 2007) is the first extended study of the country's public policy process and is based on a wide range of interviews and extensive fieldwork in Athens and Brussels. He co-directs with Kevin Featherstone (LSE) a new research project on the Muslim/Turkish minority of Thrace during the Axis occupation and the Greek civil war.
Robert Ousterhout (University of Pennsylvania)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
In terms of material culture, Cappadocia is one of the richest regions of the Byzantine world, preserving more than 700 painted cave churches, as well as monasteries, houses, and entire villages, dating primarily from the tenth and eleventh centuries. Often dismissed as eccentric and provincial, Cappadocia has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Interpretation of its material remains is hampered by the complete absence of texts from the region; chronology is often unclear due to the lack of securely dated monuments; the impact of major social changes, such as the Iconoclast movement, the rise of monasticism, and the conquest by the Seljuk Turks, has yet to be clarified. Surprisingly, most major areas of settlement have never been systematically documented. Using the speaker’s recent, detailed survey of the site known as the Çanlı Kilise in western Cappadocia as a point of departure, the lecture will reconsider the place of the art and architecture of Cappadocia within the larger framework of Byzantine cultural developments. At the same time, it challenges the commonly accepted notion that the rock-cut settlements of the region were primarily monastic, representing enclaves of Christian hermits living in the wilderness. Instead, it proposes that the settlement at Çanlı Kilise was a village, replete with houses ranging from the distinctive mansions of landowners to the hovels of the poor, as well as barns and stables, storerooms, cisterns, dovecotes, wine presses, fortifications and places of refuge, churches and chapels, cemeteries, and a few monasteries – that is, features common to any Byzantine community. As the lecture will demonstrate, Cappadocia represents an untapped resource for the study of material culture and the settings of daily life within the Byzantine Empire.
Robert Ousterhout is Professor of Byzantine Art and Architecture in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously he was Professor of Architectural History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he taught for more than twenty years. An internationally-recognized specialist in Byzantine architecture, on which he has published numerous books and articles, his research focuses on the documentation and interpretation of the vanishing architectural heritage of the eastern Mediterranean, and his current fieldwork concentrates on Byzantine architecture, monumental art, and urbanism in Constantinople and Cappadocia.
Dimitris Papanikolaou (University of Oxford, Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Alexander Nehamas, Department of Philosophy and Department of Comparative Literature
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
This paper aims to revisit Cavafy, especially the erotic Cavafy, from the point of view of the history and theory of Sexuality. Eroticism, (homo)sexuality and the construction of the (homo)sexual self, are aspects of Cavafian poetry that have been either overlooked, or strategically overshadowed in the Cavafian critical canon. The variety of approaches and the wealth of readings that could come out of such an undertaking have only recently become evident. The presentation will start with a detailed investigation of the ways in which Cavafy's writing communicates with those specific discourses that construct, codify, stabilize and instrumentalize the homosexual in the end of the nineteenth century.
Dimitris Papanikolaou (dimitris.papanikolaou@stx.ox.ac.uk) studied Classics and Modern Greek at the University of Athens (B.A.) and Comparative Literature at University College London (M.A. and Ph.D.). He was a Mellon post-doctoral fellow at University College London between 2002 and 2004. In 2004 he succeeded Professor Peter Mackridge as University Lecturer in Modern Greek at the University of Oxford . His research focuses on the ways Modern Greek literature opens a dialogue with other cultural forms (especially Greek popular culture), as well as other literatures and cultures. He is also interested in literary and cultural theory and the new perspectives it offers for the study of literature. He has recently completed a monograph Singing Poets: Popular Music and Poetry in France and Greece, 1945-1975, Oxford: Legenda (2007). Recent and forthcoming publications include articles on Cavafy from the perspective of queer theory, postmodernism in Greece, literature under the Greek dictatorship (1967-1974), and the English poems of Demetrios Capetanakis.