Seeger Center Newsletter

June 2025

A Message from the Director

Greetings from the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies!

The 2024-25 academic year was a dynamic period with new cross-listed courses, a robust Modern Greek language program, over 50 events on campus, and more than 40 events at the Princeton Athens Center. We share highlights from the spring 2025 term below. These include a lecture by physical anthropologist Christina Papageorgopoulou, new books by former Seeger fellows, lectures at the Princeton Athens Center by Angela N. H. Creager and Melissa Lane, and academic travel to Greece by Princeton undergraduates.

As always, we welcome the new visiting research fellows who have joined our academic community. Our summer 2025 cohort includes Christos Aliprantis, an associate professor of political science and international relations at the American College of Thessaloniki, Dan Batovici, a senior researcher at the Institute for the History of Christianity at the University of Vienna, and Georgia Gotsi, a professor of Modern Greek and comparative literature at the University of Patras.

For the latest updates, news and events, we invite you to visit our website, hellenic.princeton.edu, and connect with us on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Dimitri Gondicas

Director, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

Christina Papageorgopoulou Deploys Cutting-Edge Tools to Reveal the Past

Two women and thre men standing in a row.

Dimitri Gondicas, Carolyn Laferrière, Samuel Holzman, Christina

Papageorgopoulou and Nathan Arrington. Photo by Catherine Curan.

Last March, the Seeger Center co-sponsored a lecture by Christina Papageorgopoulou, a professor of physical anthropology and the director of the Laboratory of Physical Anthropology at Democritus University of Thrace. She is leading CityLife, a new project that sheds light on the shift from rural to urban living – a central development in the history of humankind.

Article on Christina Papageorgopoulou's lecture

Director's Bookshelf

In our Director’s Bookshelf series, Dimitri Gondicas speaks with authors from the Center’s academic community about their new books and the research they conducted at Princeton.

Click below for interviews with Merrick Anderson and Mark Letteney.

Merrick Anderson interview

Mark Letteney interview

The Princeton Athens Center Hosts

Angela N. H. Creager and Melissa Lane

Angela N. H. Creager lectures on “What is “Good” Research? Debates Over Scientific Misconduct in the 1980s and Beyond."

The Princeton Athens Center welcomed two acclaimed Princeton scholars last March. Angela N. H. Creager, chair of the Department of History at Princeton University and the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science, gave a lecture and led a graduate seminar. Melissa Lane, the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics, participated in a colloquium on ancient philosophy that the Center co-organizes with the Athens M.A. Program in Ancient Philosophy and gave a lecture titled "'To Know is to Act; to Act is to Know': Plato's "Republic" on motivating (ecological) guardianship."

Melissa Lane (front row, second from right) with participants in a colloquium on ancient philosophy.

Article on Angela N. H. Creager's visit to the Princeton Athens Center

Article on Melissa Lane's visit to the Princeton Athens Center

Students in "Hellenism: a Novel Story"

Travel from Text to Context

Expert guide Aristotelis Koskinas shares insights with the class about the optical illusions created by the design of the Parthenon.

Students in a new upper-level Hellenic Studies course, “Hellenism: a Novel Story,” taught by Emmanuel Bourbouhakis, an associate professor of classics and the Stanley J. Seeger '52 Center for Hellenic Studies, connected text to context with a Spring Recess trip to Greece. Bourbouhakis and his students toured the Parthenon and other historical sites and monuments.

Article on "Hellenism: a Novel Story"

Hellenic Studies in the News

• The Humanities Can Take You to a Moment with Samuel Holzman

Video credit: Danielle Capparella, Ryan Campbell and Megan Osborne, Princeton University Office of Communications

• International Team Brings Princeton’s Remarkable Mount Athos Collections to Light

By Kirstin Ohrt, Department of Art & Archaeology, May 20, 2025

Exhibition Co-Sponsored by the Center

• Roberto Lugo / Orange and Black

Art@Bainbridge gallery on Nassau St., Feb. 15-July 6, 2025

(free and open to the public)

hellenic.princeton.edu

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