Seminars

In October 1947, Messinia was struck by an earthquake. At the time Greece was in the midst of a brutal civil war and the region was rapidly becoming a critical front in the global Cold War. This workshop will explore the 1947 earthquake not just as a geological event, but as a human and political crisis. We will discuss what happens when a natural catastrophe hits a society already affected by war. Infrastructure is not a neutral force—roads, phone lines, clean water, and medical care are all weapons of control. Who gets relief, which villages are rebuilt, and who is left without assistance exposes political choices. In Messinia, this reality was complicated by the arrival of American assistance under the newly declared Truman Doctrine. Tasked with facilitating reconstruction, technocrats from the newly formed American Mission for Aid to Greece (AMAG) found themselves operating in a volatile war zone, drawing up blueprints for recovery while surrounded by military conflict. How was the urgent need for disaster relief complicated by geopolitical pressures of the Truman Doctrine and the civil conflict? Bringing together historians, archivists, geologists, and seismologists, this workshop will consider how people endured the double trauma of a civil war and a ruined landscape, how the politics of foreign aid shaped the physical and social recovery of post-war Greece, and how the study of natural disasters can shape the writing of social and political history. Vicky Kouskouna (University of Athens); Aggeliki Barberopoulou (Hellenic Center for Marine Research); Panagiotis Andrianopoulos (Archeion Taxis) are the presenters and Charis Marantzidou (Columbia University) is the respondent.

In this seminar Lilia Diamantopoulou (LMU Munich) will explore the life of Markos Abessinios, whose trajectory from enslaved child in Abyssinia to courtier in the Greek Bavarian monarchy and later merchant in Munich offers a rare lens on Black mobility in nineteenth century Europe. At the center is the 1862 anti royal satire Dialogues of the Dethroned Kings, where Markos appears as Queen Amalia’s lover. This fictionalized affair opens up questions about forced migration, racial servitude, and the limits of historical visibility. By reading satire alongside biography, the paper interrogates how Black lives were framed and fantasized within imperial structures.

SNFPHI awardee, poet, and sign language interpreting student Brikena Gishto will present her project The Wave in the Mind: A Poetry Workshop in Greek Sign Language, which gives members of the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities the chance to use visual-kinetic language to compose poetry, while also exploring how this work can challenge and expand the conventions of the poetic form. She will discuss with faculty from Columbia’s Teachers College the organizational and educational challenges that she has faced leading poetry workshops in the context of Greek public education and what it takes for literary fora to host poets from the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities.

Boulouki, a travelling workshop of architects, engineers, historians, and conservationists reviving traditional building techniques, will present its work to restore the Farmstead of Markos, the humble dwelling of the last farmer-excavator who lived on the island of Delos. Much of the work is documented in a digital archive that they have created for the project, featuring oral testimonies, photographs, architectural drawings, and project reports. As part of the seminar, Boulouki members will also explore ways to design public workshops in which participants can create comics as a way of learning about the experiences of farmers who worked for archaeological excavations and the connections to the ancient past that they forged through this work.

PhD History candidate Dimitris Mitsopoulos will explore the history of sex work in interwar Salonica, situating it within the city’s transformation from a multiethnic imperial port into a nationalized urban center in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire. Drawing on police records, League of Nations reports, and press, his seminar will consider how prostitution was shaped by overlapping processes of refugee resettlement, wartime militarization, state management of venereal disease, and the restructuring of the urban space.

In this seminar Billie Mitsikakos (DPhil, University of Oxford) brings into dialogue the dance-theater of Dimitris Papaioannou and the poetry of C.P. Cavafy to consider the traces queer bodies leave behind through movement and contact: imprints of limbs and blotched cloths that are neither disposed of nor archived in the conventional sense but nonetheless kept close in counterintuitive ways. Drawing on semiotic theory Mitsikakos asks what alternative insights into knowing and registering queer being the insistence on such remains offers and argues that such queer indexical stains disrupt dominant archival norms and radically reimagine the archive as non-authoritative, participatory, and inclusive.

Jazra Khaleed will present excerpts from Rap Divas, a documentary in progress that he is co-directing with Silvia Tsobanaki. Rap Divas follows five rappers as they try to organize a concert at the Women's Prison in Thiva. The documentary explores gender dynamics in Greek rap and the challenges that working-class women face in contemporary Greek society, while also shedding light on the intersections between the rap scene and poetic production. The screening will be followed by a poetry reading by Khaleed and a discussion.

SNFPHI and the University Seminar in Modern Greek welcome film director Yorgos Zois, who will be screening his latest film Arcadia (2024). Described as a “peculiar rumination on the hereafter” and “an unnerving and curious meditation on grief” (Variety), the film tells the story of a couple facing the grim task of recognizing the body of a loved one and trying to unearth the circumstances of her death—an endeavor that leads to encounters with the supernatural at an off-season beach bar in Marathon.