All Ages

REEESNe’s Roma Studies Student Working Group will be holding a symposium at Yale University (Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall). The Working Group consists of doctoral and undergraduate students, as well as recent graduates, from institutions such as Brandeis University, Bucknell University, Central Connecticut State University, Duke University, and Southern Connecticut State University, and all are welcome (no registration necessary) to this FREE event, which will feature their scholarship and other work on Romani topics. The daylong symposium will conclude with a keynote panel, in which they have invited Wiesenthal Center and Fortunoff Archive Postdoctoral Fellow Maria Bogdan, as well as Professor Ian McMillen, to speak. We do not foresee this being a hybrid event at this time. The full program will follow shortly.

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.

George Syrimis grew up on the island of Cyprus. After completing his military service, he received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Cornell University where he completed his B.Sc. in Education in 1990. He subsequently pursued graduate work at Harvard University where he studied Modern Greek, Classical Greek and Modern Spanish literature. His dissertation on the poetics of C.P. Cavafy’s love poems was entitled “”Try to Guard Them, Poet”: Homoeroticism and the Poetics of Opacity in C. P. Cavafy.” In 2001, he joined the newly established Program in Hellenic Studies at Yale University as the language lector and in 2004 was promoted to associate Program Chair of the same program. He has published articles on the oral tradition, Georgios Vizyenos, Cavafy, Mikis Theodorakis, and Nikos Kazantzakis. In addition to his academic work, he has also developed two electronic projects (Lexis and Ikones) for the instructions of Modern Greek. His research interests include music and national identity, religion and literature, cultural studies, reception studies, and gender and sexuality. His current research focuses on the literature on Julian the Apostate from the Enlightenment to the present.

Organized by the Program on Peace and Development at Yale University, MADE (Mass Atrocities in the Digital Era), and the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto

Mention of Greek religious music more often than not conjures up liturgical music–singing to be precise, chanting, monophonic or in unison, neumes, modes, an archaic idiom and, its raison d’être, the Word of God. Parallel to liturgical music but independent from it, flourished for centuries an equally rich and long tradition of popular religious songs. Their composition, transmission, orchestration, musical and poetics meters, linguistic idiom as well as the lyrics themselves, are consonant with the Cypriot oral tradition of music and singing. Performed almost exclusively to mark seasonally occurring rituals or rites of passage, they provide the soundtrack of saint’s feasts, wedding, funerals, harvests, and the major religious feasts of Easter, Christmas, New Year/Saint Vassilis, Epiphany, and the Advent of Lent. We are happy to bring to our audience a repertoire of feast songs from Cyprus that are rarely performed outside their ritual context or for the general public.

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

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.