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 Centre of Delphi)
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 2024 is CULTURE, POLITICS AND SOCIETIES IN TRANSITION.
The seminars will be offered in June 16-29, 2024.
Programme
Race and Global Migration *
by Glenda Carpio
Seminar description: Migration patterns have shaped and reshaped states and individuals throughout history and across the world. Forced migration, produced by imperial legacies and neo-colonialist practices and, increasingly, by climate change, poses political and social challenges in both the United States and Europe. This seminar introduces key scholarly debates in the study of forced migration in comparative race studies, and in literature.
Glenda R. Carpio is Professor of African and African American Studies, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature and Chair of the Department of English at Harvard University. She is the author of Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy (Columbia UP, 2023), as well as of Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (Oxford UP, 2008) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright (Cambridge UP, 2019). IN 2020, she was named Harvard College Professor in recognition for excellence in teaching. She is now working on a book length study of Ishmael Reed.
* The seminar will be offered from June 17 to June 21
Politics in a more-than-human world
by Martin Crowley
Seminar description: In the so-called Anthropocene, the fact that human activity is deeply enmeshed with the existence and actions of all kinds of other beings is inescapable. As a result, the planetary ecological crisis has brought forth an urgent need to rethink understandings of human action. One response holds that the transformations necessary to tackle today’s crises will emerge only from the distinctive capacity of human beings to transcend their environment. Another school of thought calls for seeing all action as composite, produced by distributed networks of human and nonhuman agents. Yet the first of these is seen as repeating the disastrous arrogance of human exceptionalism, and the second, according to its critics, lacks effective political traction. This seminar will seek a conception of political agency capable of breaking this impasse. Exploring theories of ‘distributed agency’ in the work of such thinkers as Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, we will consider the critiques to which these and other, related theories have been subjected, before testing the resulting frameworks against the specific challenges of illegalized migration, ‘algorithmic governmentality’, and drone warfare. Our aim throughout will be to formulate an effective understanding of political agency for a more-than-human world in a time of crisis.
Martin Crowley is Professor of Modern French Thought and Culture at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Anthony L. Lyster Fellow and Director of Studies in Modern and Medieval Languages at Queens’ College. His most recent book is Accidental Agents: Ecological Politics beyond the Human (Columbia University Press), and he serves as General Editor of the journal French Studies.
Before and After the New Soviet Man
by Justin M. Weir
Seminar description: This course considers conceptions of Russian and Soviet humanism, transhumanism, and posthumanism in the second half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. We will focus on intellectual history, literature, and cinema, with a special focus on the avant-garde period in Soviet culture, its relationship to the environment and human being. Authors and filmmakers include Dostoevsky, Mayakovsky, Platonov, Tarkovsky, Vertov, and Zamyatin. Along with more recent theory, we’ll consider Russian and Soviet texts by Bakhtin, Fyodorov, and Trotsky. Course materials will be viewed within the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and imperial Russian history.
Justin Weir is Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Professor of Comparative Literature, Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He is currently co-editing, with Julie Buckler, The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Novel (Oxford UP, forthcoming 2024), He is the author of Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative (Yale UP, 2011), and The Author as Hero: Self and Tradition in Nabokov, Pasternak, and Bulgakov (Northwestern UP, 2002).
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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 Centre of Delphi. 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 Centre of Delphi (Mrs. Athena Gotsi, [email protected]) by April 1st, 2024.
Decisions will be communicated to the applicants by April 10, 2024.
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 Centre of Delphi 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 2nd Delphi Dialogues.
