News release
Our second e-newsletter is hitting inboxes today!
The spring semester is drawing to a close at Simon Fraser University, which means it is time for the second edition of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies’ e-newsletter - there is a lot of news to share. Big changes first: the Centre’s long-serving director, Dr. André Gerolymatos, has stepped away from his duties to go on medical leave. We wish him all the best as he focuses on his recovery. In his place, Dr. Dimitris Krallis, Associate Professor of Byzantine History in the Hellenic Studies Program, has taken on the role of Acting Director of the Centre.
In terms of activities, it has been another eventful semester for the Centre, filled with exciting public events like the third annual Edward and Emily McWhinney Memorial Lecture with Professor Dimitris Papadimitriou from the University Manchester on the legacies of the Greek bailouts or Olga Kefalogianni’s talk at the Museum of Vancouver on Greece’ Cultural Heritage. The corridor has also been very lively with the presence of two visiting scholars and is about to get even livelier in September with the recent announcement of our first 2019/2020 Hellenisms Past and Present, Local and Global Postdoctoral Fellow. The Centre’s annual publication, the Agora, also appeared in print, recapping the previous year’s activities
The SNF New Media Lab and its team of developers have also been hard at work on the Rebooting the Greek Language project, an initiative funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation to bring state-of-the-art technology and revolutionary advances in pedagogy to bear on the preservation of the Greek language in the diaspora. The team also has been out in the community meeting with teachers, parents, and school officials to hear about their classroom needs; they were even invited to present their work to First Nations partners in Whitehorse, Yukon!
Research notes
In addition to its significant academic and community outreach activities, the SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies is also an important site for the research and advanced study of Hellenic Studies topics and issues. For instance, this past February, Dr. Dimitris Krallis published his third book: Serving Byzantium's Emperors: The Courtly Life and Career of Michael Attaleiates as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture Series. Dr. Sabrina Higgins, our resident archaeologist, was also recently awarded a grant from SFU’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab for her Digital Mary Project, an international collaborative digital humanities project that’s collecting and digitizing a broad cross-section of Marian sources.
Our graduate students have been active as well. Mr. Neal Payne, an MA student working under the supervision of our own Dr. Sabrina Higgins in the Department of Archaeology has been awarded a Canadian Graduate Scholarship (Master’s) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for his research in classical archaeology. Earlier this month, Mr. Jeffrey Greenall successfully defended his MA thesis entitled "Acting Virtuously: Ceremonial Displays of Imperial Virtue in Byzantium" under the supervision of Dr. Dimitris Krallis. Congrats!
You can read about all this and more in the links below. Be sure to follow us on Facebook,Twitter, and Instagram so you don’t miss any updates! If you'd like to receive these newsletters in your inbox every semester, please sign up below to get email updates from the SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies.
News roundup
- Rebooting the Greek Language project team presents community update on new approach to teaching Greek in the diaspora
- SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies Visiting Scholar: Dr. Larisa Vilimonović
- Welcome to Dr. Milena Repajic, the latest SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies Visiting Scholar
- We're pleased to announce the release of the latest volume of Agora
- SNF New Media Lab in Whitehorse to support First Nations language project
- We're releasing the pilot episode of Heroes of the Disk in honour of International Mother Language Day
- Olga Kefalogianni on Greece's Cultural Heritage at the Museum of Vancouver
- Professor Dimitris Papadimitriou (University of Manchester) delivers the 2019 McWhinney Lecture
- Professor Dimitris Krallis meets with the Centre's Chinese university partners
- Announcing Dr. Andreas Avgousti as the 2019/2020 Hellenisms Past and Present, Local and Global Postdoctoral Fellow
For more information about the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies, please visit our Media page.