Events

The Humanities Center at Harvard
Seminar on Modern Greek Literature and Culture

September 29, 2009. 6:30 p.m., 133 Barker Center
"Foucault in Athens"

James D. Faubion is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the
Department of Anthropology at Rice University. His publications
include work on the design of anthropological research, religion and
violence, contemporary realizations of kinship, social and cultural
thought, the sociocultural context of literary production, and
comparative ethics. He is the editor of two of the three volumes of
Essential Works of Michel Foucault and author of Modern Greek
Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism.

October 20, 2009, 6:00 p.m., Barker 133
"Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke to Read Her Poetry at Harvard"

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke was born in Athens in 1939. She studied foreign languages and literature at the Universities of Nice, Athens, and Geneva. In 1962 she was awarded the First Prize for Poetry of the City of Geneva. She received two grants from the Ford Foundation (1972, 1975), as well as the Greek National Prize for Poetry (1985) and the Greek Academy’s Poetry Prize (2000). She attended the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1974-75 and was a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer at Harvard, Utah, and San Francisco State Universities in 1982, as well as a Fellow at the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton in 1987. She has published fourteen books of poetry as well as four collected volumes. She is fluent in English, French, and Russian and is an acclaimed translator of Seamus Heaney and Alexander Pushkin, among others. Her work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Polish, Serbian, Dutch, Bulgarian, Hebrew, and English.

Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University: Research Seminar on Cultural Politics

Tuesday, November 3, 6:00 pm
K262 (Bowie-Vernon Room), CGIS Knafel Building, 1737 Cambridge St.
"Global Religion and the Post-Secular Challenge: American and European
Perspectives"

Hent de Vries
Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins
University

For further information about this Seminar, please contact the chairs Panagiotis
Roilos (roilos@fas.harvard.edu) or Dimitrios Yatromanolakis
(yatroman@fas.harvard.edu).

Monday, November 16, 5:30 pm
Weatherhead Center, S354, CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge St.
"From the Top: Government Sponsored Creativity"

Doris Sommer, Ira Jewell Williams, Jr., Professor of Romance Languages and
Literatures and in African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Seminar chairs: Panagiotis Roilos (roilos@fas.harvard.edu) and Dimitrios
Yatromanolakis (yatroman@fas.harvard.edu).

The Twenty-Third Nicholas E. Christopher Memorial Lecture

Friday, December 4, 6:30 p.m.
Harvard Hall 202

Elizabeth Jeffreys
Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Literature,
Emerita, University of Oxford
Digenes Akrites and Late Byzantine Verse Narrative
Download the Twenty-Third Nicholas E. Christopher Memorial Lecture Invitation:

Nicholas E. Christopher Memorial Lecture Archive

Second Biennial International Conference
Conference in Byzantine and Early Modern Greek Fictional Writing

December 4-5, 2009, Harvard Hall 202

Download Program:

PROGRAM
Friday, December 4
11:00-12:45: Opening Remarks

Panagiotis Roilos, Professor of Modern Greek Studies and of Comparative Literature, Director of the Modern Greek Studies Program, Harvard University

John Duffy, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Philology and Literature, Chair, Department of the Classics, Harvard University

Jan Ziolkowski, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin, Director, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Harvard University

Jeffrey Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture,  Chair, The Medieval Studies Committee, Harvard University

Fictional Narratives across Genres

Thomas Hägg, Professor Emeritus, Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen, Norway
Fiction and Factography in the Life of St. Antony

Paul Magdalino, Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Byzantine History, Emeritus, University of St. Andrews
Apocryphal Narrative: Patterns of Fiction in Byzantine Prophetic and Patriographic Literature

Paolo Cesaretti, Professor of Byzantine Studies, University of Bergamo
The Exegete as a Story-teller: The Dawn of Humankind according to Eustathios of Thessalonike

Lunch Break

14:30-16:15: Narrative Strategies and Discursive Forms

Michael Jeffreys, Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Sydney ( -2000), Oxford University and King's College, London
Three Forms of Byzantine and Modern Greek Oral Narrative and Their Written Reflections: Unrhymed, Rhymed, and Tragoudia

Anthony Kaldellis, Professor of Greek and Latin, The Ohio State University
Philosophy and the Rise of Literary Fiction in Byzantium

Niels Gaul, Associate Professor, Director of the Center for Hellenic Traditions,
Central European University, Budapest
Dialogic Constructions of Fictitious Worlds and Literary “Realitie”’: Late Byzantine Dialogues and Mimesis

Friday, December 4

18:30: The Twenty-Third Nicholas Christopher Memorial Lecture in Modern Greek Studies

Elizabeth Jeffreys, Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Literature, Emerita, University of Oxford

“Digenes Akrites” and Late Byzantine Verse Narrative

20:00: Reception in Ticknor Lounge

Saturday, December 5

11:00-12:45: Flights of Imagination: Discursive and Visual

Representations

Carolina Cupane, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Other Worlds, Other Voices: Form and Function of the Marvelous in LateByzantine Fiction

Ioli Kalavrezou, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History of Art, Harvard University
The Marvelous Flight of Alexander in Byzantium

Massimo Peri, Professor of Modern Greek Literature, University of Padova
   The Four-color Tradition in Early Demotic Greek Poetry

Lunch Break

14:30-16:15: Conceptualizing Genres

Ulrich Moennig, Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Philology, University of Hamburg
Literary Genres and Mixture of Generic Features

Roderick Beaton, Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History,
Language and Literature, King's College London
Hopeful Monsters or Living Fossils? The Komnenian Novels and Their Medieval and Modern Reception

Panagiotis Roilos, Professor of Modern Greek Studies and of Comparative Literature, Director of the Modern Greek Studies Program, Harvard University
Toward a Historical Anthropology of Byzantine Fictional Writing

The conference is co-sponsored by the Medieval Studies Committee and
the Department of the Classics.