PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies
AnneMarie Luijendijk (Princeton University)
1:30 - 4:30 PM
211 Dickinson Hall
Reception to follow
Reading packets are available in the Departments of History and Classics or by contacting Kevin Kalish at kkalish@princeton.edu.
Alexandra Moschovi (University of Sunderland; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Anne McCauley (Department of Art & Archaeology)
Room 103, Scheide Caldwell House
Long neglected as a second-rate art, photography as such was fully accommodated in the art museum in the late 1970s, a development that coincided, chronologically and ontologically, with the structural changes the museum itself was undergoing at the time. By the late 1980s, the modernist construct of (art) photography, singularly defined by the qualities unique to the medium itself, was overshadowed by an expanded lens-media field, now widely termed ‘the photographic’. Moving from the medium-specific photograph to the indexical, still or moving, image, this novel category embraces, under the same conceptual umbrella, an array of media, genres, and practices. But is this fusion really a rupture in photography’s ontological premises, an advancement to a ‘post-medium’ condition, or simply the profile of institutionalized photography? This analysis is pursued through a cross-examination of contrasting definitions of photographic practices as contemporary art.
Alexandra Moschovi (moschovi@princeton.edu) is a lecturer in photographic theory at the University of Sunderland. She holds an MA in Image and Communication (Goldsmiths College, London) and a PhD degree in the history of art (Courtauld Institute of Art, London). Her main areas of research interest are the politics of the institutionalization of photography as art and the history of Greek photography. She is an independent art critic and curator. Publications and curatorial projects include: I Ellada mesa apo ti Fotografia (ed., Athens, 2007); “The Face of Labour” (exh. cat. Work II, Amsterdam, 2007); “Distance and Proximity” (exh. cat. Work, Malaysia, 2007); “Photography, Photographies and the Photographic: Between Media, Images, Contexts” (exh. cat. The Athens Effect: 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. As an associate scholar of the Courtauld Institute of Art, she has been, since 2005, the co-convener of a research-in-progress history of photography seminar. She is also a researcher at the International Photography Research Network (www.theiprn.org) and sits on the advisory board of a, the Athens contemporary art review (www.athensbiennial.org).
Leah Whittington (Department of Comparative Literature)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
While the Iliad was translated into Latin multiple times during the fifteenth century, humanist interest in the Odyssey developed more slowly. After Petrarch commissioned translations of the two Homeric poems from Leonzio Pilato in the late 1350's, a complete version of the Odyssey did not appear in prose until 1460 and in verse until 1545. Raffaele Volterrano's hybrid prose-verse translation of 1494 is a unique largely unexplored document of humanist translation practice at work as it evolved from the ad verbum style of the Middle Ages into classicizing translation according to sense. This paper explores how Volterrano's Odyssey reveals the activity of a humanist poet in the process of discovering and practicing creative imitation as he translates Homer. Volterrano's verse passages, which rely heavily on Vergil's imitations of Homeric lines, provide a window into the Renaissance understanding and appreciation of Vergil as a Homeric imitator. These passages testify to the development and proliferation of the Petrarchan theories of imitation which formed the groundwork of the new humanist poetics.
Leah Whittington (lwhittin@princeton.edu) is a fourth year graduate student in Comparative Literature. She graduated from Harvard University in 2002 with a degree in Classics and English, and her graduate work focuses on the reception of classical literature in the Renaissance. Her dissertation project is about the rhetoric and ethics of supplication in classical epic and English Renaissance literature.
Kalliopi Nikolopoulou (University of Buffalo; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Brooke Holmes (Department of Classics)
Room 103, Scheide Caldwell House, Princeton University
This paper focuses on the “old quarrel” between philosophy and poetry (poesis qua creative arts) that has led to two articulations of the end of art - one in antiquity, another in modernity: Plato, who banned the poets from his city on account of art’s irrationality, and Hegel, for whom art was no longer a necessary vehicle for truth. Following Giorgio Agamben’s cue in The Man Without Content, this paper opts for a symptomatic reading of Plato’s condemnation of art by foregrounding his ambivalence toward poetry. In other words, Plato expelled poetry because he confronted it in its own terms as divine shudder [θεῖος φόβος]. Whereas Hegel found poetry wanting, Plato understood poetry’s truth to be tragically excessive.
Kalliopi Nikolopoulou (knikolop@princeton.edu) teaches Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Previously, she was the Mellon Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University, and visiting faculty at the English Department of the University of Cyprus. Her interests focus on philosophical approaches to European modernity (English, French, and German literatures, particularly poetry and poetics), psychoanalysis, and the relation of ancients to moderns. She has published articles on literature and continental philosophy, on figures such as Homer, Sophocles, Baudelaire, Henry James, Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, and Adorno and Kant. She is currently working on a book-length project on the reception of tragedy from German idealism to post-structuralist theory.
Christos J. Paraskevopoulos (University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Mark Beissinger, Department of Politics
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Social capital, namely social trust and participation in voluntary organizations, has emerged as a key concept in the social sciences in general, and political science/public policy in particular, over the last two decades. By facilitating collective action, social capital leads to increased levels of performance in public policy at large. The low level and peculiarities of social capital in Greece, and the general weakness of Greek civil society, tend to be regarded as key problems of domestic institutional infrastructure; problems that crucially affect the level of performance and reform in several public policy areas. This paper presents the implications of low social capital in Greece for public policy-making in the regional and environmental realms, and explores lessons offered by the United States regarding diversity and inequality.
Christos J. Paraskevopoulos (cparaske@Princeton.EDU) is Assistant Professor of European Public Policy at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies of the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the London School of Economics and has been a Research Fellow at the European Institute (2001-04) and the Hellenic Observatory (2004-05) of the London School of Economics. He has published widely on social capital, institutions, local economic development and E.U. Public Policy in various academic journals and edited volumes in the UK, US and Greece. He is the author of Interpreting Convergence in the European Union: Patterns of Collective Action, Social Learning and Europeanization (Palgrave, 2001) and co-editor (with P. Getimis and N. Rees) of Adapting to EU Multi-level Governance: Regional and Environmental Policies in Cohesion and CEE Countries (Ashgate, 2006). His current academic and research interests include the comparative study of social capital, diversity and public policy, institutions and local economic development and E.U. public policy.
Alexandra Moschovi (University of Sunderland; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Anne McCauley (Department of Art & Archaeology)
Room 103, Scheide Caldwell House
Long neglected as a second-rate art, photography as such was fully accommodated in the art museum in the late 1970s, a development that coincided, chronologically and ontologically, with the structural changes the museum itself was undergoing at the time. By the late 1980s, the modernist construct of (art) photography, singularly defined by the qualities unique to the medium itself, was overshadowed by an expanded lens-media field, now widely termed ‘the photographic’. Moving from the medium-specific photograph to the indexical, still or moving, image, this novel category embraces, under the same conceptual umbrella, an array of media, genres, and practices. But is this fusion really a rupture in photography’s ontological premises, an advancement to a ‘post-medium’ condition, or simply the profile of institutionalized photography? This analysis is pursued through a cross-examination of contrasting definitions of photographic practices as contemporary art.
Alexandra Moschovi (moschovi@princeton.edu) is a lecturer in photographic theory at the University of Sunderland. She holds an MA in Image and Communication (Goldsmiths College, London) and a PhD degree in the history of art (Courtauld Institute of Art, London). Her main areas of research interest are the politics of the institutionalization of photography as art and the history of Greek photography. She is an independent art critic and curator. Publications and curatorial projects include: I Ellada mesa apo ti Fotografia (ed., Athens, 2007); “The Face of Labour” (exh. cat. Work II, Amsterdam, 2007); “Distance and Proximity” (exh. cat. Work, Malaysia, 2007); “Photography, Photographies and the Photographic: Between Media, Images, Contexts” (exh. cat. The Athens Effect: 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. As an associate scholar of the Courtauld Institute of Art, she has been, since 2005, the co-convener of a research-in-progress history of photography seminar. She is also a researcher at the International Photography Research Network (www.theiprn.org) and sits on the advisory board of a, the Athens contemporary art review (www.athensbiennial.org).
Vasso Kindi (University of Athens; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Alexander Nehamas (Departments of Philosophy and Comparative Literature)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
This paper will explore an influence that Thomas S. Kuhn had on theoretical discussions about novelty in the arts. It will be argued, in particular, that Kuhn’s understanding of revolution in the history of science has influenced the work of Stanley Cavell who has written on modernist art and the changes it brought about. This influence consists in laying emphasis on tradition as a prerequisite to revolution in both science and art. Revolutionary agents need to master the conventions of their practice and be committed to them in order to be able to change them. In this sense, radical innovation combines the original meaning of revolution as restoration but also the modern meaning of radical break and new beginning. Kuhn’s further contribution to the concept of revolution is that he disassociates it from modernity’s idea of progress giving it a postmodern twist.
Vasso Kindi (vkinti@Princeton.EDU) holds a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Athens (1981) and a PhD in Philosophy and History of Science from the National Technical University of Athens (1991). She is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and History of Science of the University of Athens. She is the author and co-author respectively of the books in Greek Kuhn and Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigation of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Smili, 1995) and Philosophy of Science (2003) and of several articles in philosophy of science, philosophy of history, Wittgenstein and ethics in Greek and international academic journals. She is the editor-in-chief of the Greek philosophical journal Cogito and a member of the editorial board of the Greek journals Deukalion, Isopoliteia, Noesis.
Anastasia Panagiotopoulou (Archaeological Institute of Peloponnesian Studies, Hellenic Ministry of Culture; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Sparta maintains a prominent position among the cities of Peloponnese in the production of mosaic pavements, indicating that this financially powerful city flourished through late antiquity. Spartan mosaics of the Roman period are noteworthy for the variety and originality of their figurative scenes, depicted among diverse, multicoloured geometric patterns. Comparison with contemporary mosaics, whether from other Greek cities or the rest of the Roman Empire, provides evidence that local workshops were active in Sparta. This paper explores the evolution of mosaic art in the Spartan pavements, looking into the characteristic features of each period. By relating this center of mosaic pavement production to others that were active in the same period, our knowledge of the city of Sparta during the Roman period is uniquely enhanced.
Anastasia Panagiotopoulou (panagiot@Princeton.EDU) is Director of the Archaeological Institute for Peloponnesian Studies of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. She is the former Director of the Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities of Sparta. She received her B.A. in History and Archaeology from the University of Athens and her D.E.A. from the University of Paris X-Nanterre. As long-time member of the Greek Archaeological Service, she has conducted numerous rescue excavations at Samos, Patras, Laconia, Arcadia, and the Argolid. Since 2004, she has been collaborating with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Arizona in research and systematic excavation at Mt. Lykaion, Arcadia. Currently, she is working on the publication of the Roman mosaics from Sparta and on the corpus of Hellenistic and Roman mosaics of the Peloponnese.
Gerassimos Moschonas (Panteio University, Athens; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Jonas G. Pontusson (Department of Politics)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
The outstanding electoral performances of the Spanish and the Greek Socialist parties represent the major exception to a long-term process of Social-Democratic electoral decline. By dominating their opponents since the beginning of the 1980s in three political domains - social policy, institutional modernization, and cultural modernization - PASOK and PSOE became the most successful electoral duo in the European Socialist family. This paper inquires whether common underlying factors account for the success stories of PASOK and PSOE, or if their success is bound up with national specificities. Although empirical in its applications, this paper's approach is informed by more general theoretical reflections concerning factors that frequently create "cycles of domination" in party systems. Socialist success in Spain and Greece is explained by a composite political cycle in which economics was a key factor - but not always the decisive one - in party competition. Today, an "ordinary cycle" has replaced the preceding period of domination. The Greek and Spanish party systems are in the process of becoming significantly more balanced than they were in the past.
Gerassimos Moschonas (gmoschon@princeton.edu) is an Associate Professor in Comparative Politics in the Department of Political Science and History at Panteio University, Athens. He also teaches at the Institute of European Studies of the Free University of Brussels (ULB). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris-2, and is the author of La social-démocratie de 1945 à nos jours (Paris, 1994) and In the Name of Social Democracy, The Great Transformation: 1945 to the Present (New York, 2002). His main areas of research are political parties, Greek politics, European politics, and electoral competition. He is currently working on the relationship between the European Union and Social Democratic Parties.