Upcoming events for Spring 2009

[Syrimis, George]

Hellenic Studies Program
Spring 2009 Events



Wednesday, January 28, 5:30 PM
Luce Auditorium

Stavros Niarchos Lecture: “A Strategy for Greece”

Speaker: Stefanos Manos

Stefanos Manos a liberal, has been a member of the Greek parliament for 30 years and has held several ministerial positions. Stefanos Manos is a graduate of Zurich's Institute of Technology School of Mechanical Engineering and has an MBA from Harvard. After a career in business, he was elected to Parliament in 1977 with the New Democracy (ND) party and has held portfolios in Public Works, Industry and Energy, Environment and Town Planning, Economy and Finance. He was ousted from ND in 1998 and the next year founded the Liberals party. In the last parliamentary elections of 1997 he did not stand for re-election.

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Thursday, January 29, 7:00-9:00 PM
Whitney Humanities Center

My Hand Outstretched: Films by Robert Beavers

Stoas (1996) and The Ground (2001), shot and in and largely about Greece, will be included in the series of events dedicated to American director Robert Beavers who will be present during the events.  A full description of the events can be found on our website at http://www.yale.edu/filmstudiesprogram/events.html

THE STOAS
1996, 35mm film, color, sound, 22 min.
The title refers to the colonnades that led to the shady groves of the ancient Lyceum, here remembered in shots of industrial arcades, bathed in golden morning light, as quietly empty of human figures as Atget’s survey photos. The rest of the film presents luscious shots of a wooded stream and hazy glen, portrayed with the careful composition of 19th century landscape painting. An ineffable, unnameable immanence flows through the images of Stoas, a kind of presence of the human soul expressed through the sympathetic absence of the human figure. (Ed Halter, New York Press)

THE GROUND
2001, 35mm film, color, sound, 20 min.
The Ground is built around a single repeated gesture—the filmmaker gently cupping his hand against his naked chest and then rotating it outward, as if he were alternately cradling and releasing a small bird. The cleft between his breasts rhymes with the shadowy crevice in a nearby stonewall, and although there's nothing in his hand, we can hear the whir of bird wings behind the stones. The Ground makes a parallel between filmmaking and stone cutting: Both depend not only on chiseling pieces so that they fit together, but also in leaving space enough for something (mind, spirit, soul) to enter or take flight.

The event is sponsored by the Yale Avant-Garde Film Colloquium, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Council on European Studies.

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Friday, January 30, 8:00 PM
Trinity Lutheran Church, 292 Orange St., New Haven

“Cafe Aman ~ Authentic Sounds of the Aegean”

Concert by Mavrothi Kontanis & Maeandros Ensemble

With the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey which occurred after the catastrophic burning of Smyrna in 1922, many Greeks and Armenians from urban and rural areas of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) poured into the cities and towns of mainland Greece. They brought with them a shared and, in many ways, advanced culture, which proved to be a major influence on their new neighbors. One of the most obvious examples of this culture are the urban and folk songs which eventually gave birth to Rebetiko music and evolved into what we now recognize as modern Greek music. In this special concert, the Maeandros ensemble will perform a range of rare songs, which reflect the influences and turbulence of the early 1900's in Greece, with traditional songs and instrumentation from the period.

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Friday, February 6, 5:30 PM
202 Luce Hall

“Foreign Policy in the Era of the European Union and Globalization”

Speaker: Alexandros Yannis, Constantine Karamanlis Chair in Hellenic and Southeastern European Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

Alexandros Yannis has extensive experience in multilateral diplomacy with the European Union and the United Nations; including working with the European Union Special Envoy to Somalia (1994-1997), the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary General in Kosovo (1999-2000) and in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva (2001). Between 2002-2008 worked in the Council of the European Union in Brussels and for the European Union High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy, Dr Javier Solana, focusing on the Balkans and the Caucasus, including being member of the EU Kosovo Status negotiations team. Has extensive field experience in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Africa and has lectured and published widely in Europe and the USA; Research Associate in the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) in Athens (2001-present), member of the Advisory Board of the Balkan Trust Fund for Democracy in Belgrade (2003-present), Research Fellow in the Program for Strategic and International Security Studies in Geneva (2000-2002).

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Thursday, February 19, 5:30 PM
102 Luce Hall

“West Germany and the Reconstruction of Post-war Greece: Informal Actors and Official Relations”

Speaker: Mogens Pelt, Stanley J. Seeger Fellow at the Program in Hellenic Studies, Princeton University and Associate Professor in International History at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen

West Germany played a very significant role in the re-construction of Greece and was a key-actor in promoting Greece’s association with European Common Market in 1962 and her full membership of that organization in 1982. The presentation shall focus on the early post-war period, and on the politics and mechanisms that made it possible for West Germany to establish itself as a heir to Germany’s former very strong position in Greece so soon after the end of the devastating occupation of Greece by the Axis powers. In discussing these processes it shall also draw attention to the role played by informal actors in the shaping of post-war Greek-West German official relations, in particular, the Greek business tycoon Bodosakis-Athanasiadis, and, to the question of continuity and discontinuity between the inter-war period and the post-war epoch.

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Thursday, February 26, 5:30 PM
Luce Auditorium

[Lecture title TBA]

Speaker: Alexandros P. Mallias, Greece’s Ambassador to the United States

Joining the Greek Foreign Service in 1976, Ambassador Mallias has been at the forefront of Greece’s stabilizing role in the Balkans, serving as Director of the Southeastern Europe (Balkan Affairs) Department at the Foreign Ministry in Athens in various capacities, and as Ambassador to Albania, Head of the first Mission in FYROM, and Head of the European Community Monitor Mission Regional Office in Sofia, Bulgaria. He also served in Libya and at the Greek Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York, as First Counselor for Political Affairs. During his long career, Ambassador Mallias has served in many other positions, including the Department of Middle East Affairs, the General Inspection Division, the Department of Western European Affairs, the Permanent Mission of Greece to the United Nations in Geneva, and as Public Affairs Officer at the Information Center for the European Community in Athens. A proponent of public diplomacy, Ambassador Mallias has made people-to-people diplomacy an integral part of his mission in the United States, reaching beyond the bounds of Washington politics.

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Thursday, March 5, 5:00 PM
Luce Hall 102

“Greek Jewry and the Holocaust”

Speaker: Kateřina Králová
Fulbright-Masaryk Visiting Research Fellow

 Kateřina Králová completed her doctoral studies at the Charles University in Prague with a PhD. thesis on “Greek-German Relations after the Second World War in the Shadow of Nazi Past” (2007). During her doctoral studies she obtained numerous scholarships for research abroad, which she proceeded for one year at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki (2003-2004) and in other European countries (Germany, Austria, UK). She is currently a lecturer at the Institute of International Studies, Charles University in Prague, where she teaches contemporary Greek history and modern history of the Balkans. In her research she focuses on post-war social position of victims of political and civil injustice in general and Nazi occupation, anti-Semitism, and fate of its victims in southeastern Europe and Greece in particular. She presented the results of her research at international conferences, co-edited volumes in Czech and German, and published articles at peer-reviewed journals.

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Wednesday, April 8, 4:00 PM
Auditorium, Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St

“Towards the Temenos: Gregory Markopoulos' Eniaios”

Film Screening & Discussion by Richard Suchenski, GRD ’11 and former Niarchos Research Grant Recipient, Film Studies, Yale University

Markopoulos endeavored to remain and transcend himself, attempting to balance a legion of antithetical forces: the rich hallucinatory allusiveness of Romanticism vs. the unadorned factualness and concrete immediacy of the Modern; the classical ideals of the eternal and archetypical vs. the practical discoveries of the surprising, eccentric and exceptional; the severe nurture of the natural vs. the shielding articifice of the urbane; the archaic magic of theater vs. the ‚futuristic' science of media. Both bound and redeemed by the terms of a fragile, fugitive, mechanical medium Markopoulos bids us free him and ourselves by intuiting wholeness in the midst of mere instants, held fast by the charm of film time. An encounter with this process is often disconcerting - because one's unconscious workings are exposed. But it is also bracing, exhilarating- because one at some point takes a leap of faith in the destination of the work. The conundrum of the image- as cipher, snare, mirage or narcotic trap for desire; as mute witness, dead document, or mere token trace- cedes ultimately to the ideals of vision as seed, of perception as illumination, of light as pure joy- a revival of the moment when we are first surprised by beauty. (The complete text was originally published in the European Media Art Festival catalogue, Osnabrück 1999.)

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Tuesday, April 21, 5:30 PM
Location TBA

The Cult Statues Group at the Hephaisteion in Athens: On the Evidence of Interconnected Hypotheses

Speaker: Angelos Delivorrias, Director of the Benaki Musuem

Angelos Delivorrias is the director of the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece for more than 35 years. Having contributed in literature about ancient artifacts, by writing several books on art exhibitions, Mr. Delivorrias has become an unofficial ambassador of Greece, promoting Greek art abroad. Currently he has orchestrated an international exhibition with several museums around the world, in the Royal Academy of Arts in London, called "Byzantium 330 - 1456"

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May 8–10
Whitney Humanities Center (Tentatively)

The Challenge of Reform in Greece, 1974-2009 Assessment & Prospects International Conference

Organized by: Stathis Kalyvas, Professor, Yale University; George Pagoulatos, Associate Professor, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece; Haridimos Tsoukas, Professor ALBA Graduate Business School, Greece & University of Warwick, UK

Despite constant lip-service to reform in the public discourse, and several actual waves of reform since 1974, there has been very little produced by way of systematic scholarly assessment of Greece’s reform experience over the last nearly 35 years. This conference aims to provide a platform to a number of scholars and prominent policy makers to discuss the Greek reform experience and assess its prospects across most sectors of socioeconomic life.

The conference will comprise two main events. First, an academic conference, to be held at Yale University, on 8-10 May 2009, and second, a policy-making conference, to be held in Athens, Gennadius Library, on 5-7 June 2009. The Yale conference will be scholarly in orientation, seeking to advance our empirical and theoretical understanding of the Greek reform experience. The Athens conference will include policy makers (former and current), academics, and public intellectuals, aiming to assess the reform experience in Greece, suggest new ways ahead, and estimate the reform potential.

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ALL EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC



For more information please visit our website at http://www.yale.edu/macmillan/hsp

The activities of the Hellenic Studies Program are funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Hellenic Studies at Yale University