The 1st annual Vassilis Lambropoulos Essays on New Directions in Modern Greek Studies have been published! The endowed series honors Vassilis Lambropoulos, the first C.P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature, who directed the Modern Greek Program at the University of Michigan from 1999 to 2018, by offering new perspectives in the field. Thus it joins the past and future of Modern Greek Studies.
Two essays are commissioned each year by the chairs of the departments of Classical Studies and Comparative Literature (or a proxy whom they select) and the Director of the Modern Greek Program. The committee selected Christine Philliou and Dimitri Nakassis to write the first two essays.
In “Between the Temple and the Palace” Christine Philliou uses a historian’s lens to explore new directions into the past. Philliou gives an unanticipated answer to the question, what has been left out of the canon of inquiry in historical studies. She turns attention not to the marginalized minorities and Ottoman past that have received attention in much of her work, but to Tatoi, the recently charred, hard to reach, disorienting 42 km² residence of the former Greek royal family, to call for reconsideration of this space and of the unresolved meaning of the monarchy’s onetime existence and of its social, political, and material remnants in Greece today. Philliou is Professor of History and Director of the Programs in Ottoman/Turkish and Modern Greek Studies, UC Berkeley.
Dimitri Nakassis, writing “On Time, Archaeology, and Greece,” wonders what archaeology might have to offer to Modern Greek Studies. He acknowledges the “profound difficulties with modern Greece” (erasures, omissions, distortions, nostalgia) of classical archaeology as part of the field’s “(cypto-)colonial pasts and presents.” A recent shift in temporal focus from the “past as such to the past’s traces in the present” suggests productive lines of thought. By undermining archaeology’s ability to tell an origin story, this turn moves “toward a different understanding of temporality, drawing both from theoretical reflection and local ontologies.” Nakassis imagines the creation of a new space “where archaeologists and other scholars of modern Greece can collaborate in the larger project of re-imaging the Greek past, and Greece itself.” Nakassis is College Professor of Distinction, Classics, U Colorado.
