The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative

Project Update: Avato

snfphi — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 19:47:28 +0000

Ottomanists Bleona Hoxha and George Nathanail worked with SNFPHI Associate Director Dimitris Antoniou to transcribe and translate into Greek and English a slave manumission certificate that our awardees Sotiris Tsiganos and Ionian Bisai (Latent Community) discovered during their research in Avato, a village in northern Greece that is home to a long-standing Black community. This document sheds light on the history of Black communities in Greece and their connection to the Ottoman slave trade. Learn more about the Avato project and read the document here.

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New Awardee Orientation

snfphi — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 19:57:08 +0000

In early July we organized an orientation for our new cohort of awardees at the Vorres Museum in Peania, a long-standing partner, which is now home to incredible works of art that have been produced in the context of SNFPHI’s public humanities work in Greece. Awardees learned about our resources, presented their projects, and discussed challenges that they might face during implementation with former awardees and SNF staff.

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Antigoni Efstratoglou Interview

snfphi — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 19:49:22 +0000

Our awardee prison educator Antigoni Efstratoglou takes her project Breaking the Silence as vantage point to discuss in an interview with Shedia what it takes to keep inmates in a second chance school, how theater could become a means to address a traumatic past, and what public humanities can do to to foster dialogue between university students and young incarcerated individuals in Thessaly.

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SNFPHI/I&II/Benaki Museum Annual Workshop

snfphi — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 19:59:06 +0000

In the third iteration of our annual workshop with the Institute for Ideas and Imagination and the Benaki Museum at the Leigh Fermor House in Kardamyli we explored the theme of “friendship.” Our awardees, historians Eleni Kouki and Christos Mais and director and playwright Georgia Mavragani, discussed with Associate Director Dimitris Antoniou dictatorial friendships and their collapse in connection to the new SNFPHI project Lagonisi.

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Project Update: A History of Childhood Senses

snfphi — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 19:51:11 +0000

Students of the Audiovisual Media Lab of the University of Athens present new filmed testimony about WWII as part of the ongoing project A History of Childhood Senses in the atrium of the Department of Communications and Media Studies. Visiting hours and location: daily 9:00-20:00, Sofokleous 1 in Athens.

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Book Presentation

snfphi — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 19:54:49 +0000

On April 3, Columbia’s Heyman Center will host SNFPHI Director Mark Mazower, historian İpek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu, and anthropologists Naor H. Ben-Yehoyada and Neni Panourgiá in a discussion of SNFPHI Associate Director Dimitris Antoniou’s book Why Not Build the Mosque? Islam, Political Cost, and the Practice of Democracy in Greece (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). Learn more about the book and the event and register here.

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SNFPHI 2023-2024 Event Series: Bridges

snfphi — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 18:51:52 +0000

This year’s event series, Bridges, explores connections between Greece, the US, and Columbia University. The series will present SNFPHI’s unique collaborations with Greek partners in the fields of the humanities and the creative arts with events in Athens, Paris, and New York. These projects revisit Greek history in creative ways, shed light on little-known moments of cultural exchange, and, ultimately, constitute reflections on the place of academia in the public realm. Topics include a shadow theater retelling of the Greek-Turkish War of 1919-1922, ancient infrastructure and climate change, erotic geographies, Greek contemporary dance in the US, memories of the Second World War, Albanian migration to Greece and the US, Greek-American romance novelists, the history of Greek electronic music, and Columbia campus activism against the Greek dictatorship.

Image: “The Crossing.” Giannis Dimitrakis (1958-2022)

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In the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor

snfphi — Mon, 01 May 2023 14:16:45 +0000

A clear mind comes with walking, believed Patrick Leigh Fermor, the writer whose near-mythical life and far-reaching explorations of Greece indelibly shaped the way the country is imagined and studied. To mark the beginning of their collaboration, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination (II&I), its public humanities arm SNFPHI, and the Benaki Museum are organizing a workshop exploring the topic of walking at Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor’s house in Kardamili. This workshop will take place May 17-20 and bring together artists, curators, journalists, activists, and academics to reflect on their work and practice, worksop ideas for projects, and consider the place of walking in visual and ethnographic imagination, public history, and community engagement. II&I and SNFPHI Director Mark Mazower and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s biographer Artemis Cooper will open the workshop with a discussion, a recording of which will be available online.

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Project Unraveling the Cocoon of Memory concludes in Soufli

snfphi — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 15:34:48 +0000

The project Unraveling the Cocoon of Memory: Women’s Narratives of a Fading World will come to a culmination on May 27 with a public gathering in Soufli. Faculty and students from Aristotle University’s Laboratory of Narrative Research will present the four-part podcast that they have created documenting women’s lives in Soufli and invite their podcast participants to share stories with the public. For this final event, project members will create an oral history laboratory where attendees can record their own stories. They will then place QR codes throughout Soufli so that anyone can use their phone to listen to stories connected to particular locations.

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SNFPHI Events 2022-2023: Other Topoi

snfphi — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 09:43:36 +0000

This year’s event series, Other Topoi, finds inspiration in the concept of topos, a term that can refer to physical locations but also to discursive sites and ideological commonplaces. The series—consisting of workshops, film screenings, interviews, online exhibitions, art installations, and a new shadow theater play—explores topics such as literary sites that challenge national boundaries, the history of communities living in the margins of Greek society, the military campaign in Asia Minor, Athenian erotic geographies, prison life, spaces that blur the boundaries between the home and the museum, and the place of the supernatural in Greek modernity.

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