Among the most important activities of the Modern Greek Studies Association is the convening of its biennial symposium. The Modern Greek Studies Association is delighted to announce that its 28th MGSA Symposium will be hosted by the Stanley J. Seeger ’52 Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. Princeton University has a long tradition of promoting Hellenic Studies and it hosted the first MGSA Symposium in 1969, as well as the 1999 MGSA Symposium. In addition, the Seeger Center is celebrating its 45th Anniversary in 2024 and is looking forward to celebrating the next phase of its history by hosting the upcoming MGSA Symposium.
The Symposium will convene on Thursday October 17, 2024 - Sunday, October 20, 2024. Local Arrangements will be directed by Faculty Director of the Seeger Center, Dimitri H. Gondicas, with the support of several faculty and scholars on campus focused on Modern Greek Studies as well as the very capable staff of the Seeger Center. In addition to multiple scholarly sessions there will be many opportunities to attend cultural activities and social gatherings throughout the symposium. With easy access from New York and Philadelphia, the Symposium will be sure to attract participants from throughout North America and around the world.
To register for the sumposium now please follow this link →
28th MGSA SYMPOSIUM KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Saturday, October 19th, at 6 p.m.
“On the Uses and Abuses of a History of Conflict: Context and Recursion in Cyprus, 2024”
By Elizabeth Davis
Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University
Abstract:
This year marks a complicated moment for reflection and commemoration in modern Greek studies. Fifty years have passed since two critical and interlinked events transformed the modern Greek world: the attempted coup and war in Cyprus that brought its enduring division, and the restoration of democracy after the fall of the dictatorship in Greece. Given the breadth and richness of modern Greek scholarship on these events, their conditions, and their impacts, it might be difficult – perhaps impossible – to say anything new about them today. This lecture will take as a point of departure the analytic and ethical challenges of reflecting on the meaning of these events from a distance of fifty years, focusing especially on the division of Cyprus and its complex afterlives. I will think with a number of Cypriot scholars and artists who wrestle with its radical instability as an event: forensic scientists, historians, poets, photographers, and filmmakers who show how the past is present and changing all the time, and how the effect of war—division—has become the cause of other things.
Inspired by their work, in its many disciplines and registers, I will argue that the enduring division of Cyprus is an occasion for the recontextualization of much more recent and much more distant pasts, which are themselves changed in the process of that recontextualization. This is not to assert that the division has existed in Cyprus from the beginning of time; rather, it means that, given the situation as it stands today, any Cypriot past summoned up to explain the present contains the division as part of its story, and any emergent present also contains the division as part of its story. This recursivity of the division defies the temporal and ethical distancing that historical periodization can effect – dividing time into a “before” and “after” conflict, for example. The post-conflict present is not a novel situation, I will argue, but one that is ripe for the recombination, repurposing, and recontextualization of ideas, images, and stories that have been there all along. This accounts for the necessity and also the risks of commemorating the division, fifty years on.
For information about the 2022 biennial Symposium
at York University, Toronto
