Looking Back at 2024

The faculty and staff at the SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies send you and yours our best wishes For this holiday season and for the coming new year!

This past year, here at the SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies, we hosted and participated in several compelling events, both academic and more cultural in character. We opened 2024 with our Spring Speaker Series, which brought to Vancouver and our SFU campus scholars from Princeton, the University of Calgary and California State University, Sacramento. We kicked off January with a talk by our own Dr. Spyros Sofos as his talk “Greece's 'other' populism: Culture, memory and the political ascendance of PASOK in the 1980s”.

Dr. Michalis Sotiropoulos offered the Eighth Annual Edward and Emily McWhinney Memorial Lecture. His talk "Liberalism and the Foundations of the Modern Greek State (ca 1830-1880)" was moderated by the Edward and Emily McWhinney Professor in International Relations, James Horncastle. Dr. Sotiropolous of the British School at Athens was presented in cooperation with Gefyra, the SFU/UCLA collaboration.

In concert with the Centre for Greek Language in Thessaloniki, the Ellinomatheia exams also took place in May at SFU under the supervision of Dr Dionysis Arkadianos. Youth of all ages and levels in Greek language learning took part.

The SNF Centre proudly participated in Greek Day on Broadway! We were there with our spinning wheel of Greek gods, Centre buttons and, new this year, colouring sheets and posters from Staellinika, our Greek language and culture learning application. We look forward to seeing you there in 2025 with some new surprises! We also co-sponsored the Greek Film Festival associated with the Greek Day celebrations and curated by our wonderful new partner, professor Harry Killas of ECUAD.

Our Fall Speaker Series for 2024 started off with Centre Director, Dimitris Krallis, presenting on his current project “Molyvos Connections Project: A Social Geography of the North Aegean” with a talk titled “Familial Archives and Regional History: the Story from Molyvos in North Lesvos.” We continued with a rich assortment of talks from SFU faculty and students, as well as Dr. Evangelia Chordaki of Princeton University and Dr. Merih Erol of Özyeğin University in Turkey. Keep an eye on our YouTube channel where the talks will be posted as they become available.

The collaborative program between SFU and UCLA, Gefyra, brought two additional speakers to Vancouver: novelist Dr. Panagiotis Agapitos and the Music Director and founder of Cappella Romana, Dr. Alexander Lingas. Dr. Agapitos presented a talk titled, “Byzantine Crime Novels in the 21st Century: From History to Fiction” in which he lifted the veil on the literary crafting of historically situated worlds, in a lecture that also discussed the development of historical crime fiction over the decades.

Turning to another artistic medium, Dr. Lingas presented his talk “Chanting in the Footsteps of St Demetrios in Late Medieval Thessaloniki” with examples of the chants performed by the speaker himself during the event. Additionally, he taught the audience how to read the medieval notation which informed the direction of Cappella Romana.

In June of 2024, Gefyra facilitated student and faculty travel to two locations. The first, to Laconia, Greece, to continue work with the Women’s Weaving Collective in the village of Geraki, and the second, to Molyvos, Lesvos, to work with a local family archive. Students from UCLA were able to return to Geraki and work on a new project with the weavers, mapping the village and the workshops and homes of the artisans. A group of SFU students, undergraduates, as well as Master and PhD candidates, travelled to Molyvos to dive into the culture and history of the island. Both groups of students along with accompanying faculty spent a couple of days together in Athens. 

After a very busy 2024 we look forward to having you join us on our journey in 2025.

All the best this season from our family to yours, 

Dimitris Krallis, Professor & Director
Evan Freeman, Assistant Professor
Sabrina Higgins, Associate Professor
James Horncastle, Assistant Professor
Eirini Kotsovili, Senior Lecturer
David Mirhady, Professor & Chair, Department of Global Humanities
Spyros Sofos, Assistant Professor

Costa Dedegikas, Head, SNF New Media Lab
Heather Montgomery, Coordinator, Outreach & Engagement
Wallis Hartley, Program Assistant
Dionysios Arkadianos, Digital Learning Specialist.