This event is the second conference organized by the “Greek Studies Now” Cultural Analysis Network.

The conference brings together scholars from all career stages whose work is (partly) situated in Modern Greek Studies, with a particular emphasis on graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and early career scholars. It will offer young scholars the opportunity to showcase their work, give and receive feedback, and create networks leading to further collaborations and joint projects.

By inviting speakers situated in Modern Greek studies alongside speakers working (partly) in other fields, we will explore how cases from modern and contemporary Greek culture, literature, politics, and history can be brought to bear on broader theoretical, cultural, social debates. We will ask how Modern Greek studies could be repositioned through an engagement with such global debates and through comparative perspectives.

We aim at inclusivity and diversity in speakers and audiences and at stimulating interdisciplinary dialogues that will take scholars outside the comfort zones of their disciplines.

→THE CONFERENCE PROGRAM (PDF)

Greek Studies Now: Local Cases, Global Debates

Program of the 2nd conference of the Cultural Analysis Network:
Greek Studies Now

Amsterdam, 15 – 17 June 2022

 

15 JUNE 2022

Venue: SPUI25 Academic-cultural podium

 
17:00 - 18:30. Opening Panel

Future Ιmaginaries in the Making: The Case of (Post-)Crisis Greece

Moderators: Maria Boletsi (University of Amsterdam) & Dimitris Soudias (University of Amsterdam)

Philipp Katsinas (London School of Economics)
The Political Imaginary of Happiness in Greece

Eleftheria Ioannidou (University of Groningen)
From Metaphor to Action: Mobilizing the Classical Imaginary in Golden Dawn's Rhetoric and Practice

Yannis Kallianos (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
The Politics of Barriers: Infrastructural Imagination and Contestation in Times of Crisis in Greece.

Elizabeth Kirtsoglou (Durham University)
Being and Nothingness: Anticipatory Nostalgia and the Desertification of the Future in Post-crisis Greece. 

This opening event (link) will also be live-streamed. Separate registration is required for both on-site or online attendance. Please register here.

 

18:30 – 19:00. Reception at SPUI25

 

 

 16 JUNE 2022

  Venue: Doelenzaal, University Library, Singel 425

 

9:00 – 9:30. Arrival and registration

 

9:30 – 11:15. Panel 1 - Dislocating Greece[nbsp]

Moderator: Yiorgos-Evgenios Douliakas (University of Amsterdam)

William Stroebel (University of Michigan)
Deported Literature 

Claudio Russello (University of Oxford)
From the Collective to the Intimist: Charting the Language of Exile in Yannis Ritsos 

Francesca Zaccone (University of Rome, La Sapienza)
Zorbas, Gamblers and Turncoats: The Exotic Self in Thodoris Kallifatides and Antonis Sourounis Early Works

Carl Mauzy (King’s College London)
Snapshots of Race – Some Observations on Nelly’s Photography

 

11:15 – 11:30. Break

 

11:30 – 13:15. Panel 2 - Weirding Greece 

Moderator: Maria Boletsi (University of Amsterdam)

Geli Mademli (University of Amsterdam)
Crisis Matters: Filming Greece in Analog

Álvaro García Marín (University of Málaga)
Nightmare Nation: Spectralizing Greece, or the Troubling of the Classicist Archive

Alexis Radisoglou (Durham University)
Between Eco-Criticism and Oiko-Allegory: Environment, Family, and Masculinity in Georgis Grigorakis’s Digger

Dimitris Papanikolaou (University of Oxford)
Greek Culture at a Τime of Biopolitical Realism

 

13:15-14:45. Lunch Session: Practices of Cultural Analysis

Lunch panel with: Ernst van Alphen (Professor Emeritus Leiden University) & Boris Noordenbos (University of Amsterdam)

 

14:45 – 16:30. Panel 3 - Queering Greece 

Moderator: Dimitris Papanikolaou (University of Oxford)

Eirini Tzouma (Durham University)
The Greek #MeToo: An Ethnographic Approach to Glocal Vernaculars of
Resistance

Eleni Papargyriou (Open University / Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Femicide and Modern Greek fiction

Spiros Chairetis (University of Oxford)
Guilty Pleasures, Queer Disidentification: Queer Viewers Watching The Bachelor

Billie Mitsikakos (University of Oxford)
C. P. Cavafy and the Art of Queer Survival

 
16:30 – 16:45. Break

 

16:45 – 18:15. Panel 4 - Crisis, Justice & Futurology 

Moderator: Elizabeth Kirtsoglou (Durham University)

Vasilis Alexiadis (University of Amsterdam)
Prophesying War, Crisis, and Destruction: Orthodox Christianity and Eschatological Narratives in Greece.

Yiorgos-Evgenios Douliakas (University of Amsterdam)
With the Bees or With the Wolves: Horrific Intimacies in a Trial in Climax

Alexander Kazamias (Coventry University)
Adieu Tristesse, Bonjour Tristesse: Reverting to Financial Crisis after the Covid-19 Pandemic

 

20:00 – 21:45. Short films program. In-Kind: Greece Through Other Eyes

Selection of short films shifting the perspective to unseen Greek landscapes and realities, inviting non-human agents to imagine different universal futures.

Venue: Theater Munganga, Schinkelhavenstraat 27-HS, 1075 VP

Curated by Geli Mademli (University of Amsterdam)

 

 

17 JUNE 2022

Venue: Doelenzaal, University Library, Singel 425

 

9:15 – 11:00. Panel 5 – Transnational Communities & Textual Politics

 

Moderator: Alexander Kazamias (Coventry University)

Ji / Alexia Wang (University of Oxford)
Divergent Readership, Divergent Reception: A Comparison Between Two Groups of Cavafy Readers in China

Tatiana Faia (independent scholar, Oxford)
Cavafy, Crisis, and Urban Narratives in João Miguel Fernandes Jorge’s Fuck the Polis

Valia Tsaita-Tsilimeni (University of Geneva)
Contemporary Greek Poetry as an Invention of Modern Greek Society: The Collective Project of ΦΡΜΚ

Panayotis Xenophontos (University of Oxford)
Greek Literature in Mariupol in the 1930s

 

11:00 – 11:15 Break

 

11:15 – 13:00: Panel 6 - Migration: Past and Present

Book launch of Kristina Gedgaudaitė's 
Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

 

Moderator: Will Stroebel (University of Michigan)

Kristina Gedgaudaite (Princeton University)
Why Memory, Why Now?

Emilia Salvanou (Hellenic Open University)
1922 in Greek National Memory: Meanings and Representations

Olga Demetriou (Durham University)
Time, Conflict and Refugeehood

Linda Xheza (University of Amsterdam)
Visualizing Refugees in the Greek Media: The Politics of Hospitality 

     

13:00 – 14:30. Lunch 

 

14:30 – 16:15. Panel 7 - Athens Mon Amour 

Moderator: Eva Fotiadi (St Joost School of Art & Design)

Herbert Ploegman (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Athens as a Multiple: A City Enacted Through Art & Solidified by Infrastructural Change

Efi Giannetopoulou (independent scholar)
Cultural Wastelands: Heritage in Ruins

Anna-Maria Papagiannakou (National Technical University of Athens) & Yannis Apostolopoulos (National Technical University of Athens)
Post - pandemic Spatial Narratives: Revisiting Takis Zenetos’ ‘Electronic Urbanism’

Julia Tulke (University of Rochester)
The Great Intervention: Anti-Graffiti Campaigns as an Aspirational Performance of Post-Crisis

    

16:15 – 17.00. Closing remarks and future plans for GSN

 

Organising Members

Amsterdam Prof. Dr. Maria Boletsi  Dr. Eva Fotiadi Dr. Dimitris Soudias Yiorgos-Evgenios Douliakas Vasilis Alexiadis

Oxford Prof. Dr. Dimitris Papanikolaou Dr. Kristina Gedgaudaite (currently at Princeton University) Claudio Russello

 Student-assistant: Ciprian Piraianu

 

The Cultural Analysis Network Greek Studies Now (greekstudiesnow.org) is an initiative of the Universities of Οxford and Amsterdam.