Faculty

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

Low levels of social trust are widely seen as an impediment to economic development and social cohesion. Trust is measured mainly via surveys: metrics are used extensively in cross-national studies and percolate back to inform societal debates. However, the way in which trust is empirically approached is subject to two problems: measurement bias and the relation between attitudes and behavior. We address both problems focusing on Greece, currently ranked as one of Europe’s least trusting societies. We do so by using four methods: survey questionnaires, ethnography, trust games, and a field experimental exercise. Our combined findings strongly suggest both measurement bias and a discrepancy between attitudes and behavior. We explain this discrepancy and explore the drivers of trusting behavior. Our findings carry important implications about how we measure, study, and theorize interpersonal trust as well as the practice of assigning a unique trust score to entire societies.

Effrosyni Charitopoulou is a political sociologist. She investigates the dynamics of intergroup relations, focusing in particular on local and refugee interactions. She focuses on modern Greece, using both contemporary and historical case studies, but also on other European countries. Her ongoing book project, Encounters on the Migrant Trail, investigates the ways in which host communities in Greece interacted with asylum seekers in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis. She is also working on projects relating to the legacies of refugee integration as well as state exclusion policies on identity, trust, and social cohesion. She holds a DPhil in Sociology from Nuffield College at Oxford. Her doctoral studies were funded by Nuffield College, the A. S. Onassis Foundation, and the A. G. Leventis Foundation. She is currently a Hannah Seeger Davis Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton.

Toula Portokalos is 30, Greek American, and works in her family’s restaurant, Dancing Zorba’s, in Chicago. All her father Gus wants is for her to get married to a nice Greek boy. But Toula is looking for more in life. Her mother convinces Gus to let her take some computer classes at college (making him think it’s his idea). With those classes under her belt, she then takes over her aunt’s travel agency (again making her father think it’s his idea). She meets Ian Miller, a high school English teacher, WASP, and dreamboat she had made a fool of herself over at the restaurant; they date secretly for a while before her family finds out. Her father is livid over her dating a non-Greek. He has to learn to accept Ian; Ian has to learn to accept Toula’s huge family, and Toula has to learn to accept herself

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.