PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies
The Group for the Study of Late Antiquity presents:
Averil Cameron (Oxford University)
211 Dickinson Hall
The reading-packet for Averil Cameron's talk is now available at the History and Classics Departments or online.
Susan Heuck Allen (Smith College; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Constanze Güthenke (Department of Classics and Program in Hellenic Studies)
103 Scheide Caldwell House
This paper explores the British re-creation of rural landscape and parish sensibility in urban Smyrna (Izmir) and its interface with the outlying village of Bournabat (Bornova) from the late 18th to early 20th centuries. Society and social rituals were codified and passed on through the built environment, vernacular landscape and educational indoctrination. To illuminate this little-known aspect of Smyrniot history, we will examine the built environment as a material entity, visual representations, narratives from unpublished diaries and commercial archives, published accounts of early travelers and oral history. In particular, the presentation will focus on the control of access, circulation and vista, "viewing edges" symbolizing social stratification, punctuated loci of transition between public and private space, and the role of the nostalgic ekphrasis in the nurturance of British society in an unfamiliar milieu. Critical to the creation of "the corner of a foreign field/that is forever England" was the garden, in particular, one characterized by the rose and the trellis.
Susan Heuck Allen (shallen@princeton.edu) is a lecturer in archaeology at Smith College and a visiting scholar at Brown University. Since earning her Ph.D. degree in Classical Archaeology from Brown University, she has taught at various New England institutions, including Yale University. A recipient of a number of fellowships, she began her career as a field archaeologist, working on Bronze Age sites in Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, and Israel, before devoting her research to the history of archaeology, the subject of her two books: Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik (1999) and Excavating Our Past: Perspectives on the History of the Archaeological Institute of America (2002). Her research on Anglophone communities in the Ottoman Empire grew out of her first book, as did a continuing interest in the straits. Her current book-in-progress examines the role of archaeologists from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in the acquisition of intelligence for the Greek Desk of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.
103 Scheide Caldwell House
Evdoxios Doxiadis (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
103 Scheide Caldwell House
This lecture will examine the effects of the establishment of the modern Greek state on women and in particular their rights over property. During the period of Ottoman rule women’s property rights varied significantly from region to region but were nonetheless fairly well defined and enforced. The new state did not change these practices, in essence establishing the legality of customary law until the development of a new Civil Code, yet the very nature of a modern state had a profound impact on women’s property rights, eroding their ability to know, and defend, those rights. As an example the lecture will look primarily at the effects of the establishment of a modern judicial system in Greece and how women interacted with it.
Evdoxios Doxiadis (doxiadis@princeton.edu) received his Ph.D. (2007) in History from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on "The Shackles of Modernity, Women and Property in Late Ottoman and Early independent Greece 1750-1850." He earned his B.A. at Tufts University, majoring in History, Economics and Classics in 1991, and continued his studies at Glasgow University (M.B.A., 1992). His research focuses on the subject of women and property, as well as on nationalism. His paper "Standing in their Place: The Exclusion of Women from the Judicial System in the first decades of the Modern Greek State (1821-1850)" was published recently by the Journal of Modern Greek Studies.