PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies
Alexandra Moschovi (University of Sunderland / Courtauld Institute of Art)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
This talk will examine the ways in which the city and the urban experience at large have become a canvas for the exploration of the everyday, the social and the political in contemporary Greek photography. Starting from the late 1970s that signaled the beginnings of an independent creative practice that specifically treated photography as autonomous art, the lecture will explore how those early attempts to depart from the 'couleur locale' and the popular picturesque that defined indigenous amateur photography consciously turned to the city, adopting and adapting Baudelaire’s notion of flânerie. This fascination with the ephemeral and the chance element of street life would be denounced by the succeeding generation of photographers who looked anew and much more systematically into what has now been widely termed “Urban Pastoral.” The presentation will conclude with a brief reference to the recent employment of digital technologies in the construction of urban simulations.
Alexandra Moschovi is a lecturer in photographic theory at the University of Sunderland, and is also active as an independent art critic and curator. She holds an M.A. in Image and Communication (Goldsmiths College, London) and a Ph.D. degree in the history of art (Courtauld Institute of Art, London). Her main areas of research are the politics of the institutionalisation of photography as art and the history of Greek photography. Publications and curatorial projects include: Greece Through Photographs (ed., Athens, 2007); “The Face of Labour” (exhib. cat., Work II, Amsterdam, 2007); “Distance and Proximity” (exhib. cat. Work, Malaysia, 2007); “Photography, Photographies and the Photographic: Between Media, Images, Contexts” (exhib. cat., Photographic Images in Contemporary Art, Milan, 2006 / Paris, 2007); "Coincidences and Constructs: Interpretations of the Everyday" (exhibition, Thessaloniki, 2004). She was the curator of the 7th International Month of Photography in Athens in 2000. She is the co-convener of a research-in-progress history of photography seminar at the Courtauld Institute of Art where she has been an associate scholar since 2005.
1:00 pm – 6:00 pm.
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Colloquium Poster
Opening Remarks: Dimitri Gondicas (Princeton University)
Session 1: Slobodan Curcic, Chair
Ruth Macrides (University of Birmingham)
Byzantine Women in Court: Where, When, Why?
Sophia Laiou (Ionian University)
Christian Women in an Ottoman World: Interpersonal and Family Cases Brought Before the Shari’a Courts during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cases Involving the Greek Community)
Break
Session 2: Molly Greene, Chair
Evdoxios Doxiadis (Princeton University)
Property and Morality: Women in the Communal Courts of Late Ottoman Greece
Thomas W. Gallant (University of California, San Diego)
Women, Crime and the Courts on the Ionian Islands During the Nineteenth Century
Concluding Remarks: Peter R. Brown (Princeton University)
Co-sponsored by: Department of History, Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, and the Program in the Study of Women and Gender
Peter Mackridge (University of Oxford; Library Research Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Catherine-Mathilde Cicellis (Tsitseli) lived her whole life between different locations, different cultures and different languages. Her family origins lay in Greece, but she was born in France and was raised partly by an English governess who first gave her the language -- English -- in which she wrote her first books. At the age of ten she settled with her parents in Greece, where she began to learn Greek. With her husband, who was born in Romania but whose family originated in Greece, she lived for many years in England and Pakistan. In 1964 they finally settled in Greece. In 1970 she began to write in Greek, and most of her oeuvre from then on was written in Greek. Many of her works were translated from English into Greek or from Greek into English, and from the 1970s onwards she herself became one of the leading translators of literary and other texts from Greek into English. In her fictional work Cicellis presents characters and situations that are somehow out of place. Indeed, one of the chief characteristics of her writing is a sense of not belonging to a particular place. The language and style of her texts convey a sense that both the form and the content of her writing hover in a no-man's-land between different places, different cultures and different languages. The talk will focus on the way Cicellis thematizes the processes of dislocation and translation, the way she presents each of these processes as an analogy of the other, and the way her work ultimately suggests that the identities of individuals and the relationships between them are forever transitional and subject to transformation.
Peter Mackridge is Emeritus Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Oxford and a visiting professor at King's College London. He is the author of The Modern Greek Language (1985), Dionysios Solomos (1989), Ekmageia tis poiisis: Solomos - Kavafis - Seferis (2008), the co-author of Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language (1997) and Greek: An Essential Grammar of the Modern Language (2004), and the editor of Dionysios Solomos, The Free Besieged and other Poems (2000). He has co-edited two volumes of essays on the development of Greek Macedonian cultural identity and on contemporary Greek fiction. His book Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 was published by Oxford University Press in Britain in April 2009 and will shortly be available in the United States.
Pantelis Nigdelis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Scion of a merchant family of Vlach origin from Krusovo, Petros Papageorgiou (1854-1914) was one of the best known philologists of the Hellenic diaspora in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the leading figure in the intellectual life of the Greek community in Ottoman Thessaloniki for the last two decades before its liberation. Previous researchers used to classify him as an archaist and purist, or even more summarily as a disciple of Konstantinos Kontos. Although we have no programmatic texts by him, this position can be proved as oversimplified by studying some of his writings. Furthermore, due to a very important report of the Consul-General of Greece in Thessaloniki Lampros Koromilas at the eve of the Macedonian struggle, we know now that Papageorgiou’s linguistic views were shaped in favor of demoticism mainly because of the problem of education among the pro-Greek minded but non-Greek speaking native population of the area. Eventually, as other Macedonian intellectuals, Papageorgiou made the same language choices as the demoticists, primarily via the route of national integration, which was one of the ideological constituents of educational demoticism of the early years of the twentieth century.
Pantelis Nigdelis is Associate Professor of Ancient History in the Department of History and Archaeology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His main areas of interest are political and social history of Greek cities in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Greek epigraphy, and the history of Classical Studies (in particular, the field of Ancient History) in contemporary Greece (19th - 20th centuries). During the current academic year, 2008-09, he is a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
The Mount Menoikeion Seminar
Kostis Kourelis (Franklin and Marshall College)
Matthew J. Milliner (Princeton University)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Mount Menoikeion near Serres, Greece, preserves a rich tradition shaped around the thirteenth-century monastery of Saint John Prodromos. The monastery evolved into a major monastic center, surviving through volatile chapters of Balkan history. It is a spectacular monument of Byzantine art and architecture surrounded by an equally spectacular natural environment. In 1986, the deteriorating architectural shell was taken over by a female community of nuns whose spiritual guide, the Athonite monk Elder Ephraim, resides in Arizona. The Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University established an annual field seminar to investigate the site's complexities in its modern and contemporary Greek context. Since 2005, the Mount Menoikeion Workshop has brought together a diverse group of scholars and students from anthropology, archaeology, history, classics, religion, music and art history. In preparation for the 2009 summer research season at Mount Menoikeion, this presentation will focus on two aspects of the monastery's history: landscape and wall paintings. The early modern landscape of Menoikeion reveals an inherent tension between the ideal of monastic wilderness and its aggressive human exploitation; the monastery's eighteenth and nineteenth century frescoes illuminate the post-Byzantine aesthetic trajectory of mainland Greece.
Kostis Kourelis is assistant professor in Art History at Franklin and Marshall College, specializing in architectural history, archaeology, cultural theory, and preservation. He received his Ph.D. in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World from the University of Pennsylvania. He works on urbanism, rural settlements, and houses in the medieval Mediterranean. His field projects in Greece (Peloponnesos, Boeotia, Macedonia), Sicily (Monte Polizzo), Tunisia (Jerba), and the Black Sea (Chersonesos) are an integral part of his research and teaching. His articles on the Greek grand tour, on modernism and Byzantium, on medieval manifestations in film and on Greek-American immigration represent theoretical preoccupations that supplement his work on domestic archaeology.
Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He has a B.A. from Wheaton College and an M.Div. from the Princeton Theological Seminary. His dissertation examines the migration of a Byzantine icon type from Cyprus to Crete, Italy and beyond. He has explored intersections between art, architecture and theology in numerous articles, and is the research coordinator for the Mount Menoikeion Monastery Seminar. In 2009/10 he will be a junior research fellow with the Marie Curie project, "T.I.E.M." (Tracing Identity in the Eastern Mediterranean), hosted by the Cyprus Research Institute in Nicosia.
Edmund Keeley (Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English, Professor of English and Creative Writing Emeritus, Director Emeritus Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Selected poems will be read in Greek by Nikos Panou, Polina Tambakaki and Kostas Yiavis, Hellenic Studies post-doctoral research fellows, and Katerina Stergiopoulou, graduate student in Comparative Literature and Hellenic Studies.
Maria Couroucli (CNRS; Université Paris X-Nanterre; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
103 Scheide Caldwell House
Μένουν θαμμένα τόσα απ αυτά που ζήσαμε
κι απ τα βαριά κι απο τ'ασήματα.
Η μνήμη σαν να καταπιάνεται
με χωματουργικές εργασίες
στα πεζοδρόμια αυτης της πόλης.
Αρχίζει κάθε λίγο καινούργιες εκσκαφές
και καταλήγει σ' επιχωματώσεις.
(Τ. Πατρίκιος, Η αντίσταση των γεγονότων)
Remembering and forgetting both refer to the relation of present and past. Social historians agree that until the 1990's, the memory of Civil War in Greece had been repressed and refer to the 1950-1990 period as a time of omertà (sic), when public -but also private- discourse successfully feigned to ignore recent national history. I propose to look at the memory of the Greek civil war through the eyes of an individual "witness", Irene, a student at Athens University who had joined a communist-controlled resistance network, "EA" (Ethniki Allileggyi, National Solidarity) during the Nazi occupation. Irene went hiding during the first year of the civil strife in 1945 to avoid arrest and also because she had become a potential target of right-wing extremists. Her everyday life during the 1950s resembles those of thousands of "Reds" in Greece.
Most memoirs about this period are informed by Greek political life since the war years: remembrance of specific events are part of a more general picture of the past, informed by subsequent experiences and discussions about this troubled period that have been taking place in Greece in the last twenty years. Irene lives in France since 1960 and her memories of war and Civil War have only indirectly been informed by local "social frames" (Halbwachs). Instead, Irene refers to her own "frames": her memories of the past are informed both by her experience of early post-war Greek society and by her life in France.
Irene's narrative tends to corroborate the hypothesis that the "collective identity" of the Greek communists was essentially constructed inside prisons and exile camps, well after the war and resistance years, during the period of repression, through specific socializing processes within conditions of confinement, among communities of prisoners and exiles. On the other hand, the specificity of Irene’s story probably lies in the fact that this was an account of the life of someone belonging to a socio-political group historians and social scientists still know very little about: the "middle-ground" of Greek society, the non-extremists, those who in the end were not directly involved in the fighting during the Civil War, but were nevertheless trapped by the events taking place around them and who at some point did take sides - if only passively.
These hypotheses are being explored in relation to recent research on the Greek Civil War and to the more general debate about individual and collective inscribed memories and lieux de mémoire.
Maria Couroucli, a research fellow at the CNRS (Laboratoire d'Ethnologie), holds a doctoral degree in Social and Historical Anthropology from the École des hautes études en sciences socials, as well as B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research was carried out in Corfu, and was published as Les oliviers du lignage (Paris, 1985), a study which led her to investigate kinship and family, identity and nationalism. Her current research interests include shared religious practices in the post-Ottoman world as well as questions of memory and identity in relation to the Greek civil war (1946-49). She teaches in the post-graduate program of the Departement d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, and is a member of the editorial board of Ethnologie Française.