DELPHI ACADEMY OF EUROPEAN STUDIES
Sponsored
by the Region of Central Greece
The Delphi Academy of European Studies, sponsored 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; former Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center)
Peter Frankopan, (Oxford; Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research)
Michèle Lamont, (Harvard; former 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, President of the European Cultural Delphi Centre)
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.
The overarching topic of the Academy’s seminar program 2025 is Humanity in Transition.
The seminars will be offered in June 15-28, 2025.
Program
Citizens of the Earth? Cosmopolitanism in a Planetary Age by Patrice Maniglier
Seminar description:
Cosmopolitanism is not the dream (or the nightmare) of any universal empire or world government. It is the recurrent idea that political subjectivity cannot be contained within already instituted local political communities: there are political rights and duties that cut across borders. Widely discussed in the times of triumphant neoliberal globalization, it lost its grip on the imaginaries along with the social disenchantment with globalization and the rising awareness of its ecological limits.
In contrast, the seminar will investigate the idea that the present moment calls for the reformulation of the cosmopolitan idea, with the rising awareness of our ‘planetary condition’, i.e. of the fact that local forms of life can impact the entire planetary system on spatial and temporal scales that go far beyond the experiential scope of the responsible agent. What if building a ‘terrestrialized’ political agency implied reinventing cosmopolitical ideas and practices?
Introducing notions of antique (Stoic), modern (Kantian), and postmodern cosmopolitanisms (Bhabha, Gilroy, Braidotti, Appadurai, Beck), and confronting them with interpretations of the present times as of the ‘planetary’ (Chakrabarty), or “Gaia” (Latour, Stengers), the seminar will explore the concepts of “planetary agency”, “terrestrial cities”, “geocosmopolitics”, that cut across the borders of species and scales.
Patrice Maniglier is Maître de Conférences at the Philosophy Department of the University of Paris Nanterre. He is the director of the research unit HARp (Histoire des Arts et des Représentations – philosophie) and one of the founding editors of the online journal Les Temps qui restent (launched after the end of Les Temps Modernes): https://lestempsquirestent.org/fr.
His work revisits ‘structuralism’ both historically and conceptually, and articulates contemporary French philosophy, philosophy of social sciences (linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis), metaphysics and aesthetics (film theory and contemporary art), and more recently Earth system sciences.
He is the author of many books, among which Foucault at the movies (Columbia UP, 2018), La Terre, le philosophe et le virus, Bruno Latour expliqué par l’actualité (Les Liens Qui Libèrent, 2021), Sœurs, Pour une psychanalyse féministe (co-authored with Silvia Lippi, Seuil, 2023).
About the End of the World: Crises of Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Culture and Theory by Mariano Siskind
Seminar description:
Cosmopolitanism has been a vital master concept to understanding modern and modernist processes of global displacement and disjuncture, as well as liminal and transnational formations and subjectivities. Today, the displacement of more than 122 million refugees, migrants, and forcibly displaced persons as a result of environmental catastrophes, economic hardships, and small and large-scale perpetual wars and terror in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia points to the radical dislocation of the symbolic structure we used to call “world.” Is the concept of cosmopolitanism still useful in interrogating today’s generalized sense of global crisis—particularly the migration crisis and its traumatic losses? What is the ethico-political potential today of a cosmopolitanism without a world? This seminar is not about the very real historical suffering and losses of those whose bodies are wounded by the political, economic, military, and environmental upheavals that we will call ‘the end of the world;’ it is rather about the post-cosmopolitan traces of those experiences in art, literature, film, and theory, and about how we can determine what art and the critical humanities can and can no longer do about the end of the world.
Mariano Siskind is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Desires. Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (2014), Rumo a um cosmopolitismo da perda. Ensaio sobre o fim do mundo (2020) and The Modernist Songbook. Standards y variaciones sobre formas muertas (2021). He has co-edited four books on foreigness, migrations and cosmopolitanism with Sylvia Molloy, Homi K. Bhabha, Gesine Müller y Guillermina De Ferrari. In2025 he will publish the collection of essays, Dislocaciones y fin de eso que ya no es mundo, and is working on a new book, tentatively titled About the End of the World: The Demise of Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Culture.
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Upon completion of the seminar program, 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 (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) by the Academy at the European Cultural Delphi Centre. The seminar program 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 Delphi Centre (Mrs. Athena Gotsi, [email protected]) by March 17, 2025.
Decisions will be communicated to the applicants by April 4, 2025.
Successful applicants who will accept the Delphi Academy’s offer are expected to contribute the non-refundable registration fee of 250 euros to the European Cultural Delphi Centre as a token of their commitment to participate in the seminar program. This amount will also secure their attendance at other possible concurrent events organized by the Centre, including e.g., the 3rd Delphi Dialogues.