Delphi Academy of European Studies, 14-27 June 2020

The Delphi Academy of European Studies, supported by the Region of Central Greece, focuses on the diachronic and synchronic study of European history and culture and the ways in which Europe today responds to the multifaceted challenges of political, economic, and cultural globalization.
The curriculum and academic function of the Delphi Academy of European Studies is overseen by an international Committee consisting of the following Professors:
Homi Bhabha, (Harvard; Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center)
Georges Dertilis, (École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
Peter Frankopan, (Oxford; Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research)
Michèle Lamont, (Harvard; Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs)
Spiros Pollalis, (Harvard School of Design)
Panagiotis Roilos, (Harvard; founder of the Academy and chair of the committee)
Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, (Johns Hopkins University)
The Academy offers two-week interdisciplinary, tuition free Seminars at the Centre’s facilities in Delphi. The Seminars, which are taught in English by world renowned scholars, are open mainly to graduate students/PhD candidates but also to qualified undergraduates. The instructors adopt interdisciplinary approaches to their subjects, with a view to addressing the research interests of students in the Humanities as well as the Social Sciences. The Seminars are accompanied by a workshop and/or invited lectures on current political and cultural developments in Europe.
This year the Academy’s Seminar Programme will focus on Cultural Politics in Europe: Ideologies, National ‘Traditions’ and Transnational/Transcultural Relations
The Seminars will be offered in June 14-27, 2020.
The 2020 Seminar Programme is as follows:
Susan Rubin Suleiman
 “A Europe without Walls?  Language, Identity, and the Search for Community after 1989”
Seminar Description
The fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 ushered in a new era in European history, and in world history.  The reunification of Germany and the end of communism in eastern Europe created great hopes for European (and global) unity and democracy, although it was also clear from the start that old demons–historical enmities, nationalism, xenophobia, antisemitism– might also be awakened.  The Balkan civil wars of the 1990s confirmed that fear, and after 2001 the rise of Islamicist terrorism and the migration crisis contributed to increasing tensions and border anxieties in western as well as eastern Europe.  In this seminar we will explore some of the major responses to the post-Wall era, by writers and filmmakers as well as philosophers and literary theorists in Europe and the United States.  Cosmopolitanism, the European Union, world literature, translation studies and cultural exchanges on the one side; nationalism, “identitarianism,” the rise of far-right parties and anti-immigrant policies on the other.  In addition to theoretical and philosophical works, we will view films by István Szabó (Meeting Venus, 1991) and Philippe Lioret (Welcome, 2009) and discuss novels by Milan Kundera (L’Ignorance/Ignorance, 2000) and Michel Houellebecq (Soumission/Submission, 2015).  While there will be time to read the novels during the seminar, students are encouraged to read them (in the original French or in English translation, both easily available) beforehand.
1). Susan Rubin Suleiman was born in Budapest and emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents.  She is the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and Research Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where she has been on the faculty since 1981.  Her books include Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, 1983 (French trans. Le roman à thèse ou l’autorité fictive, 1983); Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, 1990; Crises of Memory and the Second World War, 2006 (French trans. Crises de mémoire: Récits individuels et collectifs de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, 2012), and The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th Century France, 2016 (French trans. La Question Némirovsky: Vie, mort, et héritage d’une écrivaine juive dans la France du 20e siècle, 2017).  She is also the author of a memoir, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, 1996 (French trans. Retours: Journal de Budapest, 1999). Professor Suleiman has won many honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Central European University .  In 1990, she received  the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement, and in 1992 she was decorated by the French Government as an Officer of the Order of Academic Palms (Palmes Académiques).  In April 2018 she was awarded France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur.
 
2). James Faubion
“The Rise and Fall of Structuralism”
Seminar Description

Structuralism has its theoretical and political manifesto in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind (published in French in 1962). Theoretically, the manifesto has its origins in Lévi-Strauss’
synthesis of structural linguistics and informatics. Theoretically and politically, it opposes any doctrine—-Marxist, phenomenological or existentialist–of the individual as the ground or master of signification. Widespread in its impact in Europe and elsewhere throughout the 1960s, structuralism begins to succumb to its “post-structuralist” critics by the mid-1970s. The post-structuralists owe much, theoretically and politically, to structuralism, but criticize its neglect of the historicity of systems of signification and, correlatively, its failure adequately to acknowledge power and authority as pivotal in the determination of what does or does not count as being of significance. Readings in the course include excerpts from Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Frederic Jameson, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak.

 

James D. Faubion is Radoslav Tsanoff Chair and Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. His scholarship engages ancient and modern Greece; anthropology and philosophy; the anthropology of ethics; the anthropology of the temporal imagination; contemporary modalities of governance; kinship; research design; social and cultural theory; and socioaesthetics. He is the editor (with Dominic Boyer and George Marcus) of Theory Is More Than It Used to Be (Cornell 2015); of Foucault NowCurrent Perspectives in Foucault Studies (Polity 2014); (with George Marcus) of Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be (Cornell 2008); of The Ethics of Kinship (Roman and Littlefield 2001); of the second and third volumes of Essential Works of Michel Foucault The New Press 1998, 2000); and of Rethinking the Subject: An Anthology of European Social Thought (Westview 1995). He is the author of An Anthropology of Ethics (Cambridge 2011); The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millennialism Today (Princeton 2001); and Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism (Princeton, 1995).

 

 

3). Katharina N. Piechocki
 
“Rethinking Europe: Cartography and the Making of a Continent”
Seminar Description
What is Europe? Where are Europe’s borders? When did the idea of Europe as an autonomous continent emerge? These questions may seem drawn from today’s headlines, but they were essential on the brink of early modernity, when Europe’s continental contours were first drawn. This seminar traces the “idea” of Europe through the dual lens of literature and cartography. We will see that Europe—all too often equated with “the West”—is an astonishingly unexamined continent commonly taken as a fixed and stable category, immune to time or history, a monolith within a broader discussion of a “world” in flux. “Provincializing Europe,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty has long advocated, demands a return to the question of what Europe actually means and meant—now and in the past. We will study the multiple literary, cultural, and cartographic traditions that came to shape Europe, from antiquity to the present, as a both dynamic and controversial continent. With an eye to path-breaking theories of the border and the “spatial turn” (Bachelard, Harley, Deleuze, Soja, Massey, Farinelli, Anzaldúa) we will explore writers such as Homer, Strabo, Macrobius, Augustine, Petrarch, Christine de Pizan, Columbus, Vespucci, Sor Juana, Aphra Behn, Jules Verne, and Wisława Szymborska.

 

Katharina N. Piechocki is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She specializes in early modern European literature (in particular Italian, French, Portuguese, German, and Polish) and cartography, gender, translation studies, theater, opera, and performance studies. Her recent book, Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2019), traces the emergence of Europe as a continent at a particularly momentous turning point in its formation: when a new imagining of Europe was driven by the rise of a novel humanistic discipline—cartography. Her current book project, Hercules: Procreative Poetics and the Rise of the Opera Libretto, explores the emergence of the libretto as a new literary genre in times of rising absolutism through the lens of gender and performance studies. She joined the faculty at Harvard in July 2013, after completing a PhD. in Comparative Literature at NYU (2013) and a Dr.phil. in the Romance Studies Department at Vienna University (2009).
 

 

Upon completion of the Seminar Programme, certificates indicating the titles of the Seminars and the names of the Instructors will be awarded to the students.
Students will be offered free lodging and meals (lunch and dinner) by the Academy at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi.
The Seminar Programme is tuition-free.
Applicants to the Academy should submit the following documents:
1) CV (no more than 3 pages).
2) Research statement no longer than 200 words.
3) Two letters of recommendation (one from the applicant’s PhD/academic advisor, in the case of graduate students). The letters should include information about the applicant’s coursework and academic performance in areas related to the topics of the seminars.
4) Proof of English language competence.
 
Applications should be submitted to the European Cultural Centre of Delphi (Mrs. Athena Gotsi, conferences2@eccd.gr) by April 10, 2020.
 
Decisions will be communicated to the applicants by April 25.
 
To see comments of 2019 participants, click here 


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