Humanities

Early Modern Explorations: A Conference in Honor of Mary Terrall

Published: May 10, 2022

Presented in-person on the UCLA campus in Royce Hall 314 and livestreamed on the Center’s YouTube Channel   livestream is PDT Organized by Theodore Porter (University of California, Los Angeles) The “Scientific Revolution,”…

Bilingual Lecture Series: Nahid Pirnazar

Published: April 29, 2022

Judeo Persian Writings an original comprehensive collection published in 2021 gives parallel examples in Judeo Persian and Perso Arabic script and their translations into English Most Judeo Persian documents not…

Chamber Music at the Clark presents: PUBLIQuartet

Published: April 29, 2022

This special Saturday evening concert will be held outdoors on the Clark Library’s East Lawn. Concert lottery winners are invited to picnic on the grounds prior to the concert and…

Erich Gruen | Antisemitism in the Pagan World

Published: April 19, 2022

Co-sponsored with the Center for Religion and the Department of History. This event will be hybrid. To receive an email with the Zoom link to attend remotely, please RSVP at…

Roderick Beaton, “Asia Minor in the Life and Work of George Seferis”

Published: April 13, 2022

A Celebration of National Poetry Month

In May 1944, at the height of a new crisis facing the Greek government in exile during World War II, which he served as a high-ranking diplomat, George Seferis confided these thoughts to his Alexandrian Greek friend Timos Malanos: ‘It might surprise you if I tell you that the event that has affected me more than anything is the Asia Minor Catastrophe. . . . From the age of 13 I’ve never ceased to be a refugee.’ This talk describes Seferis’s early life in Smyrna and the seaside village of Skala tou Vourla, and the ways in which he came to reflect on both, in later essays and poems. Moving forward to the end of the 1940s, the story resumes when the poet returned to his birthplace while serving in the Greek embassy in Ankara. During this period, traveling widely in Asia Minor, Seferis experienced what he termed a ‘wider Hellenism’, one that encompassed the Hellenistic expansion in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great and continued throughout the millennium of the Byzantine Empire. From these later experiences, and the poems, essays, and diaries that he wrote at the time, it emerges that, for Seferis, Asia Minor had become not only his own ‘lost homeland’ and that of his family and more than a million of his contemporaries: it was also the ‘lost homeland’ of Hellenism itself, whose heartland it had been for many centuries.

Roderick Beaton grew up in Edinburgh and studied English Literature at Cambridge, before specializing in Modern Greek studies. For thirty years until his retirement, he held the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London, and is now Emeritus. Beaton is the author of several books of non-fiction, one novel, and several translations of fiction and poetry, all of them connected to Greece and the Greek-speaking world. He is a four-time winner of the Runciman Award, and his books have been shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Cundill History Prize. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), a Fellow of King’s College (FKC), and Commander of the Order of Honour of the Hellenic Republic. From 2019 to 2021 he served as a member of the Committee “GREECE 2021,” charged by the Greek government with overseeing events commemorating the 200th anniversary of the start of the Greek Revolution in 1821, and from September to December 2021 as A.G. Leventis Visiting Professor in Greek at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book, The Greeks: A Global History, is published by Basic Books (October 2021).

This event will be introduced by Her Excellency Alexandra Papadopoulou, Ambassador of Greece to the United States.

Exclusive poetry reading by renowned Greek actor Stelios Mainas (Tetarti 04:45, Mystikes Diadromes, The island)

Not a Hoover

Published: April 12, 2022

Stephen A. Kanter Lecture on California Fine Printing Given by Richard Wagener, Mixolydian Editions This lecture will be live streamed on the Center’s YouTube Channel and available to watch  following the event. Richard…

Chamber Music at the Clark presents: Ying Quartet

Published: April 5, 2022

The Grammy Award-winning Ying Quartet occupies a position of unique prominence in the classical music world, combining brilliantly communicative performances with a fearlessly imaginative view of chamber music in today’s…

Chamber Music at the Clark presents: Horszowski Trio

Published: April 5, 2022

Giving performances that are “lithe, persuasive” (The New York Times), “eloquent and enthralling” (The Boston Globe), and described as “the most compelling American group to come on the scene” (The…