The American College of Greece

The Eleftherios Venizelos Chair of Modern Greek Studies

VENIA DIMITRAKOPOULOU (Greece b. 1965) Bas-relief of Eleftherios Venizelos 2001 [fired clay (38×30) © ACG Art Collection] The Eleftherios Venizelos Chair was established in 2003 in recognition of the Greek statesman’s contribution to this country and his support to The American College of Greece in its relocation from Asia Minor to Greece, following the catastrophe of Smyrna. The primary goal of the chair is to focus research, debate and attention on the most important and interesting developments in Modern Greek history – a history in which Venizelos played a key role.

Eleftherios Venizelos Chair Holders

Edith Hall (2023-2024) is a Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University in the North-East of England, but travels across Britain and the world to speak about the ancient world to schools, universities, theatre companies, public events and the media. Her specialism is ancient Greek literature, but she enjoys putting the pleasure as well as the rigour into all aspects of ancient Greek and Roman history, society, and thought.Her publications include: 2021 Tony Harrison’s Radical Classicism. Bloomsbury; 2020 A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain 1689-1939; Routledge Taylor Francis. Co-authored with Henry Stead; 2018 Aristotle’s Way. Penguin/Random House. Much translated; 2014 Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind; Norton/Bodley Head. Much translated;2013 Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides’ Black Sea Tragedy. OUP; 2010 Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun. OUP; 2008 The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey. IB Tauris & Johns Hopkins UP;2006 The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama & Society. OUP; 2005 Greek Tragedy & the British Theatre 1660-1914. With Fiona Macintosh. OUP.; 996 Aeschylus’ Persians, ed. with Introduction, Translation & Commentary. Aris & Phillips/Oxbow; 1989 Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy. OUP.She has been awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Athens and DurhamShe is the recipient of many prizes, distinctions and scholarships including: 2022 Fellowship of the British Academy; 2022 Longlisted for Runciman Prize with Tony Harrison: Poet of Radical Classicism and 2015 Erasmus Prize Medal of European Academy for contribution to international research.
Christine Philliou (2022-2023), Professor of History and Director of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies and Modern Greek Studies Programs at UC Berkeley, specializes in the political, social, and cultural history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey and Greece as parts of the post-Ottoman world. Her first book, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (University of California Press, 2011; Greek edition Alexandria Press, 2021; Turkish edition İş Bankası Kültür Press, 2022), examined the changes in Ottoman governance leading up to the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Her second book. Turkey: A Past Against History (University of California Press, 2021; Greek edition Alexandria Press, 2022), focuses on the fraught history of the idea of opposition/dissent, connecting literature, politics and the construction of official History in the Ottoman Second Constitutional and Republican period of Turkish history. Her interests and other publications include comparative consideration of empires across Eurasia, the various levels of transitions from an “Ottoman” to a “post-Ottoman” world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and political and cultural interfaces in the eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, and Balkans in the early modern and modern eras.
Roderick Beaton (2020-2021) had a long career at King’s College London, first as Lecturer in Modern Greek Language and Literature (1981-88), then as Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature (1988-2018), and since then as Emeritus. From 2012 to 2018 he also served as Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at the same institution. Roderick Beaton is the author of many books and articles about aspects of the Greek-speaking world from the twelfth century to the present day, including George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel. A Biography (2003); Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (2013), both of which won the prestigious Runciman Award for best book on the Hellenic world, and Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation (2019, now a Penguin paperback). He is completing an overview of Greek history from the Bronze Age to the 200^th anniversary of the Greek Revolution in 2021, to be published in 2021 with the title The Greeks: A Global History. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA, 2013), a Fellow of King’s College (FKC, 2018) and Commander of the Order of Honour of the Hellenic Republic, an award conferred on him by President Prokopios Pavlopoulos in September 2019.
Douglas L. McElhaney (2019-2020). Former Ambassador, Foreign Affairs Expert. Douglas L. McElhaney is a 34 veteran of the US Department of State. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2004-2007 where he helped renegotiate a wartime constitution. McElhaney previously served as American Consul General in Italy, and acting Ambassador in France. He oversaw U.S. negotiations that enabled the entry of the first three eastern European countries into the NATO alliance and was a major player in the planning for NATO interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo. McElhaney also served in Cairo, Windhoek (Namibia), Lisbon, and Rome. After leaving the Foreign Service, McElhaney taught as distinguished Ambassador in residence at the University of Miami. He is the founder of the St. Petersburg (FL) Conference on World Affairs which is a large public seminar on global issues.
Cemal Kafadar (2018-2019). Dr. Cemal Kafadar is Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies in the History Department at Harvard University. He has also taught in the Near Eastern Studies Department at Princeton University. He is interested in the social and cultural history of the Middle East and southeastern Europe in the late medieval/early modern era. His publications include the following: Suleyman the Second and His Time, edited by Halil Inalcik (Isis,1993); Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (University of California Press 1995); How Dark is the History of the Night, How Black the Story of Coffee, How Bitter the Tale of Love: the Changing Measure of Leisure and Pleasure in Early Modern Istanbul (Brepols Publishers, 2014;) Evliya Çelebi in Dalmatia: an Ottoman Traveler’s Encounters with the Arts of the Franks (2014).
Eleni Bastea (2017-2018). Regents’ Professor of Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico (UNM), and Director of the International Studies Institute, UNM. Author of many articles, poems, essays, book chapters and books including: The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning the Myth (Cambridge University Press, 1999), co-winner of the London Hellenic Prize and a finalist for the Runciman Prize; Memory and Architecture (University of New Mexico Press, 2004); and Venice without Gondolas, a poetry collection (Finishing Line Press, 2013). The recipient of several grants and awards, she lectures internationally on memory and architecture, cities and literature, and on modern Greece & Turkey.
Stathis N. Kalyvas (2016-2017). Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science and Director, Program on Order, Conflict and Violence at Yale University. Author of a number of articles and books including The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2006) The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Cornell University Press, 1996), and Modern Greece (Oxford University Press, 2015). Recipient of fellowships and grants as well as of several awards e.g. the Woodrow Wilson Award, the Luebbert Award, the European Academy of Sociology Book Award, and the J. David Greenstone Award.
Lou Ureneck (2015-2016), Professor and Director of the Master’s Concentration in Business and Economics Journalism at Boston University. Former editor-in-residence and Nieman fellow at Harvard University, senior editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and editor-in-chief of the Portland Press Herald. His most recent book is The Great Fire – One American’s Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century’s First Genocide (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015). His previous two books were Backcast (Viking Press, 2007), which won the National Outdoor Book Award for literary merit, and Cabin (St. Martin’s Press, 2011). His work has appeared in numerous periodicals including The New York Times, Boston Globe, and the International Herald Tribune.
Sir Christopher Pissarides, PhD (2014-2015), Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, Professor of European Studies at the University of Cyprus, Chairman of the Council of National Economy of the Republic of Cyprus. Recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Economics jointly with Dale Mortensen of Northwestern University and Peter Diamond of MIT.
André Gerolymatos, PhD (2013-2014), Professor of History and Director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Holder of the Hellenic Canadian Congress of B.C. Chair for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University.
Alexander Kitroeff (2011-2012), Associate Professor, Department of History, Haverford College.
Charles Stewart (2010-2011); D.Phil., Oxford University. Reader in Anthropology at University College London.
Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith, CMG, KCVO (2009-2010); D.Phil., St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Author and former ambassador.
Eleftheria Bernidaki – Aldous (2008-2009); MA, PhD, Johns Hopkins University. Professor of classical literature, Deree – The American College of Greece. Former member of the Greek parliament.
Georgios Anagnostopoulos (2005-2006); PhD, Brandeis University. Professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
Andreas Andrianopoulos (2003-2004); MA, University of Kent; Diploma, University of Oslo; Diploma on Leadership, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Honorary PhD, School of Economics, University of Sofia; LL.D., Deree – The American College of Greece. Former Member of the Greek Parliament as well as Minister in the Greek Government. Public Policy Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Director of the Institute of Diplomacy and Global Affairs, Deree – The American College pf Greece.

Academic year 2014-2015 events

“Socially Sustainable Economic Growth” Eleftherios Venizelos Chair Lecture by Sir Christopher Pissarides, Tuesday, April 28, 2015, John S. Bailey Library
Kimon Friar Lecture by Professor Barry Strauss on “Cunning and Strength: Leadership Lessons from Themistocles”, Tuesday, October 14, 2014, John S. Bailey Library

Academic year 2013-2014 events

“The Shadow War: Espionage in Occupied Greece, 1941-1944” Eleftherios Venizelos Chair Lecture by Dr André Gerolymatos, Wednesday, March 12, 2014, John S. Bailey Library
Anne Carson reads her award winning work “Antigonick”, Monday, December 2, 2013, John S. Bailey Library.

Academic year 2011-2012 events

A one day conference entitled “History and Memory” which included a screening of Maria Iliou’s documentary “Expulsion and Exchange of Populations (Turkey – Greece 1922-1924)” Tuesday, March 27, 2012, 7th Level Auditorium.
Lecture by Dr. Alexander Kitroeff on ” “From Μπρούκληδες to Brooklynites-a Greek American History” November 15, 2011, 13:40-15:00
Documentary Screening: “The Journey: The Greek-American Dream”. With a discussion led by historical consultant of the documentary and 6th Venizelos Chair Holder, Alexander Kitroeff and film director of the documentary Maria Iliou (Pierce Alumna), November 18, 2011, 17:00.

Academic year 2010-2011 events

Lecture by Dr. Charles Stewart on: “Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece”, Oct. 21, 2010, 13:30-15:00.
Lecture by Dr. Charles Stewart on: “Dreaming in a Time of Financial Crisis: Naxos, 1930”
A one day conference on: ” Colonizing the Greek Mind? The Reception of Western Psychotherapeutics in Greece”, May 17, 2011.

Download here the volume “Colonizing the Greek Mind? The Reception of Western Psychotherapeutics in Greece” edited by Charles Stewart and published by Deree – The American College of Greece. To download the volume in greek click here.

Academic year 2009-2010 events

Lecture by Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith: “Dimitris Vikelas: Writer, Businessman, Olympic Visionary – A Man of Many Talents,” October 29, 2009.
Lecture by Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith: “Family, Personality, Charisma: The Case of Venizelos,” December 1, 2009.
A one day conference on: “The Craft of Biography: Writing Greek Lives,” March 11, 2010.

Contact Information: For more information, please contact the Dean of the Frances Rich School of Fine & Performing Arts: Tel: 210 600 9800, ext 1456 e-mail: [email protected]

Kimon Friar Visiting Lectureship in Modern Greek Arts and Letters

YANNIS TSAROUCHIS (Greece 1910-1989) Mr. Friar 1946 [oil on canvas (42×33) © ACG Art Collection] This Lectureship was inaugurated in 1992 in honor of the poet, anthologist and first major translator of Modern Greek poetry who made Modern Greek literature known abroad and opened up new prospects for its study outside Greece. Kimon Friar bequeathed part of his personal library and manuscripts to the College. The items are housed in the John S. Bailey Library. The annual lectureship has been granted to the following distinguished scholars and writers of Modern Greek literature:

#	YEAR	SPEAKER
1	1994	Roderick Beaton Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature and Head of the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, King’s College, University of London.
2	1995	Edmund Keeley Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English, Emeritus, and Emeritus Professor of English and Creative Writing, Princeton University. Translator of modern Greek poetry and novelist.
3	1996	Peter Bien Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College and translator of modern Greek literature.
4	1997	Stratis Haviaras Writer, editor and Curator of the George Edward Woodberry Poetry Room and Henry Weston Farnsworth Room at the Harvard College Library.
5	1998	Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke Poet and translator of literature.
6	1999	Stavros Deligiorgis Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa. Author of scholarly works, translator and editor.
7	2000	George Economou Writer, scholar and translator.
8	2001	Patricia Willis Former Curator of Marianne Moore’s papers at the Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia. Elizabeth Wakeman Dwight Curator of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Author of works on M. Moore.
9	2003	Langdon Hammer Professor of English, Yale University. Author of scholarly works.
10	2004	Greg Nagy Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University. Curator of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature and Director of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. Author of scholarly works.
11	2006	Karen Van Dyck Doukas Chair, Professor, Program in Hellenic Studies, Classics Department, Columbia University. Translator of Modern Greek literature and author of scholarly books.
12	2007	Dimitris Tziovas Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Director of the Center for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham. Author of scholarly works.
13	2008	Vassilis Lambropoulos C.P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek, Departments of Classical Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan. Author of scholarly works.
14	2009	Michael Hertzfeld Professor of Anthropology and Curator of European Ethnology in the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Author of scholarly works.
15	2010	Molly Greene Professor of History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. Author of scholarly works.
16	2011	Barry Unsworth Author of 17 novels, among them “Mooncranker’s Gift”, which won the Heinemann Award for 1973, and “Sacred Hunger”, which was joint winner of the 1992 Booker Prize. “Pascali’s Island” (1980) and “Morality Play” (1995) were shortlisted for the same prize.
17	2012	David Ricks Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature at King’s College London and a Fellow of the College. Author of scholarly works, translator and poet.
18	2013	Mark Mazower Historian and author. Ira D.Wallach professor of history at Columbia University and director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities. He comments on current affairs for the Financial Times, The Guardian and other newspapers.
19	2013	Anne Carson Poet, classicist, translator, academic. Teaches Creative Writing at New York University. Recepient of many awards and prizes including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Prize and the McArthur Fellowship.
20	2014	Barry Strauss Military historian, classicist and author. Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies and Chair of the Department of History at Cornell. His books have been translated into ten languages.
21	2015	Dr. Gail Holst-Warhaft journalist, broadcaster, prose-writer, poet, academic, musician, and translator, is Adjunct Professor at Cornell University. Among her many publications are Road to Rembetika (1975, 5th edition 2013), Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music (Hakkert, Amsterdam, 1980), Collected Poems of Nikos Kavvadias (1987), Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature (Routledge, 1992), and The Cue for Passion: Grief and its Political Uses (Harvard, 2000), I Had Three Lives: Selected Poems of Mikis Theodorakis (Livanis, 2005). She was Poet Laureate of Tompkins County for 2011 and 2012. A new volume of poetry and prose about Greece, The Fall of Athens, is forthcoming with Fomite Press.
22	2016	Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944. He is the author of eleven books of fiction, including the New York Times best-selling novels Independence Day and Canada. He is also an essayist and writes frequently for newspapers across Europe. His work has been translated into 28 languages and has won numerous international awards, including the Prix Femina in France, The Princess of Asturias Prize in Spain, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the United States. He is Emmanuel Roman and Barrie Sardoff Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University in New York City. He lives with his wife Kristina Ford in East Boothbay, Maine, in the United States.
23	2017	Carol Becker is Professor of the Arts and Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts. She is the author of numerous articles and several books including: The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change (Prentice Hall & IBD, 1987); The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility (Routledge,1994); Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety (State University of New York Press, 1996); Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002); Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production (Paradigm Publishers/Routledge, 2009); and her most recent long essay memoir, Losing Helen (Red Hen Press, 2016). She also works closely with the World Economic Forum’s program on art and culture. This year the Kimon Friar Lecture is being organized in collaboration with the Fulbright Foundation in Greece as part of Fulbright’s 70 years of educational and cultural exchanges between Greece and the United States.
24	2018	Daniel Mendelsohn a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, is the author, most recently, of the acclaimed memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, named a Best Book of 2017 by numerous US publications and winner of the Prix Méditerranée in France. His other books include the international best seller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and many other honors; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; a translation, with commentary, of the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy; and two collections of essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken and Waiting for the Barbarians. He teaches literature at Bard College.
25	2019	Ian McEwan was born in 1948 and lives in Gloucestershire, England. He is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels, as well as The Daydreamer, a set of stories for children. He has written many screenplays as well as the libretto for an opera. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, 1975, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, The Cement Garden, Enduring Love, Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize, Atonement, Saturday, Solar and Sweet Tooth. His novels On Chesil Beach and The Children Act, were recently adapted by him for the screen. This year sees the publication of Machines Like Me, a novel about AI.
26	2022	Eleni Sikelianos was born and grew up in California, and has lived in New York, Paris, Colorado, and Providence. She is the author of nine books of poetry and two hybrid memoirs (The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine). Five of these have appeared in French and one in Greek, and her work has been translated into many other languages. She herself translates from the French. Her writings, deeply influenced by ecopoetics and family as well as animal lineages, have been widely anthologized, and she has been the recipient of numerous awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, The National Poetry Series, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Princeton University’s Seeger Fellowship, and the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing. Dedicated to the many ways poetry manifests in communities, she has taught workshops in public schools, homeless shelters, and prisons, and collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists. She currently teaches at Brown University.
27	2023	Gonda Van Steen earned a BA and MA degree in Classics in her native Belgium and a PhD degree in Classics and Hellenic Studies from Princeton University. Her research interests include Greek language and literature through Byzantine and Modern Greek, Western travelers to Greece and the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth and twentieth-century receptions of the classics and especially of ancient theater, and modern Greek intellectual and social history. Van Steen holds the position of Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature in the Centre for Hellenic Studies and the Department of Classics at King’s College London. She is the first woman to hold the Koraes Chair. Van Steen is the author of the following books: Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece, published by Princeton University Press in 2000 and was awarded the John D. Criticos Prize from the London Hellenic Society; Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire, (2010); Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands (OUP, 2011); Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967-1974 (OUP, 2015) and Adoption, Memory and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? (University of Michigan Press, 2019). The latter appeared also in Greek translation as Ζητούνται παιδιά από την Ελλάδα: Υιοθεσίες στην Αμερική του Ψυχρού Πολέμου (Athens: Potamos, 2021). This book, won the 2019 Book Prize of the European Society of Modern Greek Studies. Van Steen is also preparing the annotated edition of a postwar and Civil War memoir written by an American social worker active in relief services in northern Greece: The Battle for Bodies, Hearts, and Minds in Postwar Greece: Social Worker Charles Schermerhorn in Thessaloniki, 1946-1951 (Routledge, 2023). Van Steen has further published articles on ancient Greek and late antique literature, on postwar Greek feminism, and on Cavafy. Her latest research project is a long-term study of the organized mass adoptions of Greek children to the USA (and to the Netherlands) in the first fifteen years following the end of the Greek Civil War (1950 – mid-1960s).
28	2023	Victoria Hislop studied English Literature at Oxford University and afterwards worked in book publishing, PR and journalism. Inspired by a visit to Spinalonga, the abandoned Greek leprosy colony, Victoria wrote The Island in 2005. She was named Newcomer of the Year at the British Book Awards and the novel became an international bestseller, translated into 40 languages, with over 6 million copies sold worldwide. It was turned into a 26 part Greek TV series which achieved record ratings for Greece. Her affection for the Mediterranean then took her to Spain, and in The Return she wrote about the painful secrets of its civil war. In her third novel, The Thread, Victoria returned to Greece to tell the extraordinary and turbulent tale of Thessaloniki and its people across the 20th century. Published in 2011 to widespread acclaim, it confirmed her reputation as an inspirational storyteller and was shortlisted for a British Book Award. The Thread is currently in development with a British TV production company. The Sunrise, set in Cyprus and published in 2014 (currently optioned for Greek television), was followed by Cartes Postales from Greece, which is her first work of fully colour-illustrated fiction and was also short-listed for the British Book Awards fiction title of the year. It was adapted into a twelve-part drama for ERT1 in 2021. Those Who Are Loved, published in 2019, tells the story of Greece’s traumatic period of occupation and civil war during the 20th century. In 2020, came the sequel to The Island, One August Night, which was adapted for Greek state television in 2022. Victoria’s first book for children, Maria’s Island (listed by Waterstones as one of the best children’s books of the year) was also published in 2020 – and is an adaptation of The Island for a younger audience. All of Victoria’s novels have hit the number one position in the UK charts, but have also been bestsellers in Greece, China, France, Israel and Norway. She has won several literary awards in France. In 2019, Victoria was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Sheffield, and in 2020 she was given Honorary Citizenship by the Greek President for her promotion of Greece. Her latest novel, The Figurine, was published in the UK at the end of September 2023 and is due for publication in many other languages (in Greek in December).

Contact Information:

For more information, please contact the Dean of the Frances Rich School of Fine & Performing Arts: Tel.: 210 600 9800 ext 1456 E-mail: [email protected]