Ages 18

Join Eric Karpeles and Alissa Valles for a discussion of the Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski: his life, his work, and the remarkable range of poets he inspired. Karpeles and Valles are the translators of the NYRB Classics titles Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp and Memories of Starobielsk: Essays Between Art and History, respectively, both of which collect Czapski’s critical writing, authored either about or during his internment in a Soviet Prison Camp between 1939 and 1941.

Eric Karpeles is a painter, writer, and translator. His comprehensive guide, Paintings in Proust, considers the intersection of literary and visual aesthetics in the work of the great French novelist. He has written about the paintings of the poet Elizabeth Bishop and about the end of life as seen through the works of Emily Dickinson, Gustav Mahler, and Mark Rothko. He is also the author of Almost Nothing: The 20th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski from New York Review Books.

Alissa Valles is a poet, translator and scholar of Polish and Russian literature who has worked for the BBC Russian Service, Institute of War Documentation in Amsterdam and Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, and teaches at Boston University and Mt Tamalpais College. Most recently she published the poetry collections Anastylosis (with A. Ayerbe and C. Leproust, Whitechapel Art Gallery), Hospitium and a selection of Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poetry, Firebird (NYRB). Forthcoming in 2024 are Oho by Miron Białoszewski (with C. Cavanagh, NYRB) and a Selected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert (with J.M. Coetzee, Penguin Modern Classics). She has been the recipient of awards for poetry and translation from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Modern Language Association.

Sponsors:
Yale Translation Initiative (MacMillan)
Whitney Humanities Center
European Studies Council (MacMillan)
Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies (MacMillan)
The Department of Slavic Languages and Literature

Throughout history, Cyprus has been variously described as ‘the island of love’, ‘the birthplace of Aphrodite’, ‘the island of saints,’ and ‘the land of lemon and olive trees. In the past half century, Cyprus has also been known as a land of pain and sorrow; an island of division and loss. On this musical journey to Cyprus, Nicoletta Demetriou (voice), Nikitas Tampakis (viola), and Panayotis League (laouto) explore this varied identity, as expressed through the island’s music and song. Join these three accomplished musicians on an imaginary journey to Cyprus, as they sing about the joys and intricacies of love, the pain and sorrow of loss, and the hope for better days to come

With Nicoletta Demetriou (voice), Nikitas Tampakis (viola), and Panayotis League (laouto)

The Activities of the Hellenic Studies Program are generously funded by the Stavros Niarchos Center for Hellenic Studies at Yale University.

Janine di Giovanni is a multi-award winning journalist and author, and CEO/Executive Director of The Reckoning Project. Janine was a war reporter for nearly three decades, from the first Palestinian intifada in the early 1990s to the siege of Sarajevo; the Rwandan genocide; the brutal wars in Sierra Leone, Somalia, Ivory Coast and Liberia to Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan. She reported extensively in Iraq pre and post invasion, the Arab Spring, and finally Syria. Her field work for her most recent book took her to Gaza, Iraq, Egypt and Syria. In 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her their highest non fiction prize, the Blake Dodd. Janine served as a Senior Fellow and Professor at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs from 2018-2022 where she taught two human rights courses which looked at eight different conflicts in depth: Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. She also taught a course at Yale in Reporting War for Humanitarians. In 2016, CNN made a short video about her life and work when the International Women’s’ Media Foundation gave her their prestigious Courage in Journalism Prize.

For her most recent project, Janine founded and directs The Reckoning Project, a transitional justice organization that trains researchers in Ukraine to collect testimonies that can be used in court. Through her work as a conflict journalist, Janine has experienced firsthand the frustration when testimonies collected directly from victims are inadmissible in courts. So, in partnership with Peter Pomerantsev, she’s created a team of legal experts and journalists to bridge the gap between journalism and justice.

With the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is worth taking stock of the status of various efforts to pursue justice for international crimes. Di Giovanni, whose organization The Reckoning Project supports testimony collection and preservation, will address the success, challenges, and opportunities in this realm

With support of the Program on Peace and Development, the Genocide Studies Program and the Schell Center for International Human Rights

How were state formation and early modern politics shaped by the state’s proclaimed obligation to domestic welfare? Drawing on a wide range of historical scholarship and primary sources, this book demonstrates that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was common to early modern England, Japan, and China. This normative platform served as a shared basis on which state and society could negotiate and collaborate over how to attain good governance through providing public goods such as famine relief and infrastructural facilities. The terms of state legitimacy opened a limited yet significant political space for the ruled. Through petitioning and protests, subordinates could demand that the state fulfil its publicly proclaimed duty and redress welfare grievances. Conflicts among diverse dimensions of public interest mobilized cross-regional and cross-sectoral collective petitions; justified by the same norms of state legitimacy, these petitions called for fundamental political reforms and transformed the nature of politics.

Wenkai He (Ph.D., MIT, 2007), is associate professor of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Before joining the Division of Social Science of HKUST, he was An Wang postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. His research interests include comparative historical analysis in social science, political economy of state formation, and the political and economic history of China. His manuscript, The Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State: Early Modern England, Meiji Japan, and Qing China, is published by the Harvard University Press in 2013. His current research project, funded by Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council (RGC), is a comparative study about legitimation of state power through social policies such as plague prevention, famine relief and river works in early modern England and 18-19th century Japan and China.

One of the most underreported human catastrophes of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the ongoing cultural and existential erasure of the country’s Nadazov Greek population, which, prior to the war, constituted the third-largest ethnic group (after Ukrainians and Russians) in the bitterly contested Donetsk region. Most of these Greeks were concentrated in and around the city of Mariupol, which they founded after Catherine the Great had resettled them from their ancient homeland of Crimea in 1778. This imperial precedent—and the cultural prejudice used to justify its expedience—would persist. The Soviet policy of mass persecution of Greeks, which included deportations, executions, and bans on their language and culture, started with the NKVD’s so-called “Greek Operation” under Stalin in 1937 and continued for many years thereafter. For today’s Nadazov Greeks, who come from a region of Ukraine that has been militarized since 2014 and much of which was effectively destroyed in some of the heaviest fighting of 2022, Russia’s war and occupation now pose a question of both cultural preservation and immediate survival.

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Tetiana (Tatiana) Liubchenko is an associate professor of Greek Linguistics at Kyiv National Linguistic University (Ukraine). She obtained her undergraduate degree in Philology (English language and literature, Modern Greek) from Mariupol State University in 2000 and received her PhD in Greek Philology from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2009. She has published over 50 articles in various subfields of linguistics. Tetiana was head of the Modern Greek and Translation Studies section at Kyiv National Linguistic University. She also served as an expert at the Hennadi Udovenko Diplomatic Academy of Ukraine through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine; an expert at the Institute of Education Content Modernization through the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, which supervised the publication of school textbooks under state order; and she was head of the All-Ukrainian School Olympiad in Greek Language and Literature. As a representative of the Greek population of Ukraine, she has been participating in the organization of numerous international events at the diplomatic level for more than 25 years. With the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine, she moved to Greece, where she works as a translator and interpreter and serves as a representative of the Union of the Greeks of Ukraine in Greece, a non-profit organization. Her most recent projects include translating and participating in a 2023 documentary about the Ukrainians and Greeks of Ukraine who now live in Greece as a result of the war (part of the “Thessaloniki The Human Histories” TV series). She is also working on launching a website dedicated to the preservation of the legacy of Ukraine’s Nadazov Greeks.