Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies
17th Annual Postgraduate Colloquium, 4th June 2016
Westmere House, University of Birmingham

Redefining the Margins: Seeing the Unseen in the Eastern Mediterranean

Papers are invited for the 17th Annual Postgraduate Colloquium at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies. There are fashions in scholarship just as there are in costume or architecture, which means that certain topics are emphasised while others are marginalised. For example, 25 years ago a huge proportion of Byzantine art historical scholarship was devoted to illuminated manuscripts; today this is a much smaller field of study. This colloquium will focus on those 'lost' subjects, or subjects that never held the spotlight. We are interested in 'peripheries' of all sorts, including more traditional forms of marginalisation. The act of 'marginalisation' has been perpetuated and experienced in societies throughout the world: to construct the 'other', to classify as 'fringe' or outside the 'mainstream', to define and to diminish borders, populations, cultures and ideas, both with or without intention.
Papers of approximately 20 minutes in any of the fields related to Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies are welcome. Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words no later than Thursday, 31st of March to Anna Kelley at ack442@bham.ac.uk. Applicants will be notified of selection within two weeks of this date.
Please note, limited bursaries to help with travel costs of speakers are available. Please email for details.

Hi/stories in Contemporary Greek Culture: The Entanglements of History and the Arts since 1989
Workshop at the University of Copenhagen, 23-25 June 2016

As in any nation, debates about history have occupied a central place in the Greek public sphere where authors, artists and intellectuals have played a prominent role in shaping narratives about the past. Much has been said and written about the specific meaning of history in Greece given the fact that the country’s acclaimed ancient history, both Classical and Christian, is considered not only national history but also the foundational history of the entire Western world.
Have these circumstances led to a particular sensitivity in Greek culture vis-à-vis narratives about the past, or have they rather created a numbness and unwillingness to engage critically with such narratives? What do fictionalized accounts of the past tell us about Greek historical consciousness? This workshop aims to bring together scholars who are engaged in mapping and discussing Greek history and culture as it is expressed in contemporary literature, film and other narrative genres.
While the classical past weighed most heavily on Greek national self-perceptions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more recently the Byzantine, Ottoman and modern European legacies have generated many more examples of representations of the past. 1989 marked a significant moment in the way European countries perceived their pasts and their futures. The end of the Cold War led to new quests for national identities in the former Soviet bloc, and for interpretations of the past and visions of the future in place of Communism, while western European nations could no longer represent Communism as the significant other against which to shape their identity and contemporary purpose.
In Greece, the EEC/EU membership (1981) and the new geo-political map following 1989 have rekindled debates about the country’s position between East and West, resulting in frequently inflexible discourses about the country’s Eastern/religious legacy on the one hand, and its Western/Enlightenment legacy on the other. The voices in these debates often come from historiography and other academic circles, but literature, cinema, theatre and other media have been important for negotiating questions of heritage and belonging. How has the past been approached by authors, artists and filmmakers since 1989? Which narrative techniques and cultural typologies have been used to approach, represent and interpret the past? Which specific pasts are chosen for such representations, and for what purposes, political, ideological? Is the purpose to challenge traditional narratives or to reinforce them? Do these representations of the past have the potential to heal collective traumas or is their function rather to create nostalgic spaces of remembrance (and forgetting)? What impact do such narratives of the past have on historiography and public debate? Why are so many of these accounts of such appeal to contemporary audiences in Greece, and in the Greek diaspora?
The workshop is intended to provide a scholarly forum to discuss and develop these and related questions. We therefore encourage presentation of research from diverse disciplinary backgrounds on contemporary literary narratives and cultural representations of the Greek past, whether episodic or of the long duration. We also invite consideration of the influence of such narratives and representations on historiography (including history text-books and documentaries) and related academic disciplines, as well as on institutions and sites of memory such as museums and monuments.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• Developments in Greek historical fiction since 1989
• Contemporary historical drama
• Uses of the past in Greek film and TV production
• Greek historical documentaries
• The relationship between academic history writing and the arts
• Biographies and fiction
• The intersection between national, global and local narratives
• Past, present and future in fictional accounts of the past
• Narrative techniques in historical fiction
• The melodramatic mode in Greek literature and film

There will be public lectures and events held in conjunction with the workshop, but the focus will be on scholarly discussion in a closed forum with pre-circulated papers. Paper abstracts (max. 400 words) along with a short bio should be submitted to tsw@hum.ku.dk by 1st November 2015.

Organizing committee
Trine Stauning Willert, Modern Greek Studies, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
Gerasimus Katsan, Department of European Languages and Literatures, Queens College, CUNY
Charles Lock, English Studies, Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen
Catharina Raudvere, History of Religions, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
Mogens Pelt, History, The Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen

The 2015 Graduate Research Colloquium of the Society for Modern Greek Studies will take place at King's College London on Wednesday 10 June 2015.

Venue: The Council Room (K2.29), Strand Campus, King’s College London, WC2R 2LS.
Admission is free but registration is required via Eventbrite. Please register at: http://2015grc.eventbrite.co.uk

Programme
11.00-13.00 COMMEMORATION: MONUMENTS AND RITUALS
Martha Papaspiliou (King’s College London), Literary monuments to ‘national heroes’: nationalizing Kyra Phrosyne in the 19th century
Jessica Kourniakti (Oxford), Rebuilding the Colossus of Rhodes in the 1960s: Greek-American identity landmark or tourist attraction?
John Burke (Newcastle), Commemorating a troubled past on a divided island: Britain, Cyprus and the Kyrenia Memorial controversy of 2009
Marios Chatziprokopiou (Aberystwyth), Ashura in Piraeus: the performance and politics of lamentation by Shia Pakistani migrants in Greece

13.30-15.00 DEFINING IDENTITY: GENDER, CLASS, SELF AND OTHER
Mikela Fotiou (Glasgow), The cinematic work of Nikos Nikolaidis and female representation
Helga Malshi (Manchester), Pre-head and post-head adjectival modification in Modern Greek
Elena Bitsiani (Birmingham), Representing the bourgeoisie in fictional texts of the 1920s and 1930s

15.15-16.45 THE ‘SICKNESS OF THE CENTURY’?
Iakovos Menelaou (King’s College London), Homosexuality as illness in Cavafy
Chloe Howe-Haralambous (Oxford), The cultural poetics of murder: the case of the Ogre of Seih Sou
Russell Henshaw (Oxford), Reform in Crisis: austerity and the social economy in Greece

17.00-18.30 THE WRITTEN WORD AND ITS ADDRESSEES
Anastasios Mikalef (Birmingham), The pro-British press in the Ionian Islands (1849-1864)
Elissavet Evangelidou (Birmingham), The Dekemvriana in literature for young adults: the case of George Sari’s novel Oi nikites
Fiona Antonelaki (King’s College London), The sound recordings of Nikos Engonopoulos and Odysseus Elytis: a comparative listening

Abstracts of the papers can be found in the attachment.

Submissions are invited for the 7th Biennial Hellenic Observatory PhD Symposium on Contemporary Greece and Cyprus, which will take place at the London School of Economics on 4-5 June 2015.
The deadline for submission of abstracts has been extended to 2 March 2015.
Full information can be found at:
http://us8.campaign-archive2.com/?u=0cffe523acd8e0bbaa83d3ab1&id=0e08dae...

The 12th International Conference on Greek Linguistics will take place at the Freie Universität, Berlin, from 16 to 19 September 2015.

The invited speakers are Elena Anagnostopoulou (Crete), Peter Mackridge (Oxford), Maria Sifianou (Athens), Donca Steriade (MIT) and Spyridoula Varlokosta (Athens). Further information can be found in the attached Call for Papers.