2025

friday, November 28, 2025

Abstract

Socrates is recognized as the first great martyr in western philosophy, put to death by an Athenian democracy unwilling to tolerate his new ideas. This paper will examine one of the vehicles of this intolerance, the slander and prejudice against him that was exploited by his prosecutors. It will focus in particular on the early rhetorical tradition of slander (diabolē), against which he responds in Plato’s Apology of Socrates, and which led to both Aristotle and Anaximenes devoting chapters to slander in their rhetorical manuals two generations later.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2025

Abstract

This presentation examines the ways in which history can be approached through comic narratives. In it, the graphic novel Aivali — which will be analyzed in greater detail in this section — serves as a central example.

Aivali is a Graphic novel of 450 pages, published in 2014 by Kedros Editions. This work deals with the end of the Greek-Turkish War in Minor Asia (1919-1922) and the population exchange that followed. With the Treaty of Lausanne (1923-1924) the Greek and Turkish governments agreed to the mutual mass expulsion of Asia Minor’s Orthodox Greeks and Muslims from Greece’s territories. As a consequence, about 1,500,000 civilians were forcibly driven out of their homelands on either side of the Aegean.

Aivali is a carefully crafted narrative that uses the language and visual codes of comics. Within this work, archival historical research is interwoven with fieldwork—including photography and the collection of materials—as well as family archives.

Friday, November 7, 2025

Abstract

How does an understanding of road systems shed light on human interactions, especially in seemingly isolated settings? The study of recent paths points to underlying, historical connections across the landscape. Evidence from Byzantine church inscriptions, painting, and even standing domestic architecture further illuminates the movements of people, allowing us to question long-held ideas about networks, exchanges and “influences.”

Friday, October 17, 2025

Abstract

At the start of the nineteenth century no country or administrative unit called Greece existed. When Grecophone intellectuals, French diplomats, or British businessmen wrote about Greece, they often referred more to an idea, with an inherently vague geography, than an actual place. When they put forth proposals for regime change in the region—replacing the Ottoman Porte with an Orthodox state—they generally spoke in terms of an empire spanning vast swaths of Southeast Europe and Anatolia. Yet, at the end of the Greek War of Independence, a small nation-state called Greece appeared on the map. Based on the recently published Unintended Nations: France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World (McGill-Queens, 2025), this talk traces out this history. It tracks how the unanticipated creation of a Greek state created a new form of legitimacy for the very idea of the nation in international politics. Situating these events in a continental and global context, the talk examines how French (informal) imperial ambitions and competition with Britain helped underwrite the establishment of Greece. It explores how these dynamics shaped notions of Greek identity and global civilizational, religious, and racial hierarchies.

Friday, September 19, 2025

Abstract

What is “public-facing scholarship” and why bother to do it at all? In this talk, Drs. Chelsea Gardner and Sabrina Higgins will discuss their work with the Peopling the Past project and the new edited volume “Ancient Pasts for Modern Audiences.” Specifically, they will address the field of Ancient Mediterranean Studies (“Classics”) and its colonial pasts, and why we, as academics, have a responsibility to make our research widely accessible and inclusive, particularly as we face ever-growing challenges related to the spread of mis- and dis-information.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2025

Abstract

When and how can crises overcome the fragmentation of a core executive and facilitate a centralised management response? Using Greece’s three bailout programmes (2010-18) as case studies, the talk draws on several literatures to ascertain the nodality the Crisis Response Networks (CRNs) that successive Greek Prime Ministers utilised in order to deal with the country’s creditors and oversee the implementation of bailout conditionality at home. Based on an extensive range of elite interviews, including all four Prime Ministers who led Greece during the crisis, the talk traces the interplay between PM agency and key players within the Core Executive and the CRN during different stages of the crisis and assesses the extent to which the ‘bailout years’ challenged the underlying modus operandi at the heart of the Greek government. More broadly, the talk speaks to current debates on executive empowerment in the US and the dynamics of crisis management in Europe and the Middle East.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2025

Abstract

The cult of Dionysos Phallen centred on a mysterious olive-wood face dredged up from the Aegean by fishermen and worshipped at Methymna as a representation of Dionysos. In trying to make sense of this cult, scholars have privileged the evidence of two relatively late writers of the 2^nd c. CE who were not from Lesbos over earlier evidence from Lesbos itself, above all the iconography of each city’s coinage. This has resulted in awkward attempts to make the evidence for similar-looking cults at other cities on Lesbos somehow relate to Methymna’s cult. In reality, the history of these similar-looking but different cults of Dionysos in each city tell an important story about how competing impulses of competition and collaboration shaped the intra-island dynamic of Lesbos throughout antiquity. 

Friday, March 28, 2025

Abstract

Drawing from my experience editing the collective volume The Nile Delta: Histories from Antiquity to the Modern Period in a time of accelerating climate crisis, I will reflect on what transhistorical and Land-based approaches to the history of this region can teach us, and what potential futurities these combined narratives allow us to (re)imagine.

Friday, March 21, 2025

Abstract

The public reading of the Torah scroll has been one of the central liturgical practices of Judaism for two millennia. Because of its importance, generations of Jewish scholars and rabbis have formulated, written, and then interpreted regulations, narratives, and regulations surrounding it. These can be found across the breadth of ancient Jewish literature. In this paper, Professor Picus examines the reading ceremony described in Pseudo-Aristeas. How does it conform to scriptural antecedents—and how does it re-understand them in a Greek-speaking context? Is the ceremony described a pre-cursor of the later rabbinic Jewish ritual, or does it reflect a different stratum of the tradition?

Friday, February 28, 2025

Abstract

When you write in a language that is not your native tongue, you recreate and reinvent your identity – your cultural identity, but mainly, the identity of the narrator. Immigration means starting from scratch. To write in a language that is not your native tongue is like starting the narration of your life from the beginning. That is why I felt as if the Greek language was a new pair of shoes, which gave me the desire to run. Narrating in a “foreign” language, I felt not only like a participant but also like an observer of my own experiences. Greek offered my narration a different style and pace. But mostly, Greek offered me the distance I needed to reshape and re-read my previous and current experiences. Sometimes, this distance transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar and works as a shield. The “foreign” language does not carry the psychological burden of your native language. Writing in the language of the Other, especially about your own life, you feel as if you have acquired a layer of protection from the overwhelming weight of your own experiences.

Friday, January 31, 2025

Abstract

In modern art and popular culture, Byzantium is rarely represented and when it is, it appears through cursory allusions. This talk will look at the fragments of Byzantium in modern popular culture to study the ways in which queer artists and authors deployed the period to imagine an alternative to the western Middle Ages.

Friday, January 24, 2025

Abstract

The first Orthodox Christian deaconess of the twenty-first century was ordained in 2024 in Zimbabwe in answer to decades of calls from around the world to renew the ancient order of deaconess and in response to local needs in the African setting. The ordination of Deaconess Angelic Molen and her current liturgical and pastoral roles overlap but also depart from the rites and roles of a Byzantine deaconess. Why might the roles of a deaconess be different today compared to her Byzantine predecessors? What might this ordination mean for the rest of the Orthodox world? In this public lecture, Orthodox scholar Carrie Frederick Frost of Western Washington University will describe and frame the recent ordination, which she witnessed, within the larger context of the conversation about women’s roles and deaconesses in the Orthodox Church and will address the complexities and significance of renewing a Byzantine order for today. 

Friday, January 17, 2025

Abstract

Greek mythology is a point of fascination across popular culture, including within board games. Many games go beyond using mythology as a simple aesthetic theme, weaving ideas from ancient Greek epics, poetry, and theatre into their mechanics and rule systems. A close investigation of 21^st century board games such as Santorini, Minotaur, and Cyclades reveals parallels between the process of gameplay and repeated story elements from ancient primary sources, including the Odyssey and the Argonautica. Through detailed depictions of interactions between gods, heroes, and monsters, these games create an interactive sense of mythological and fantastical antiquity. The process of playing them encourages a close, detailed reception of ancient Greek myth and storytelling.