Liberalism and the Foundations of the Modern Greek State (ca 1830-1880): Presenting the 8th Annual McWhinney Memorial Lecture with Michalis Sotiropoulos

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies is pleased to announce the Eighth Annual Edward and Emily McWhinney Memorial Lecture will take place in coopertation with Gefyra, an SFU/UCLA collaboration.

This year's talk is entitled "Liberalism and the Foundations of the Modern Greek State (ca 1830-1880)" and will be given by Michalis Sotiropoulos, The 1821 Fellow in Modern Greek Studies, British School at Athens.

The event will be moderated by Global Humanities assistant professor James Horncastle, the holder of the Edward and Emily McWhinney Professorship in International Relations.

When:
Thursday, March 21, 2024 at 7:00 PM PST

Where:

Segal Building

Room 1200
Simon Fraser University
500 Granville Street
Vancouver, British Columbia V6C 1W6

ABSTRACT

How was the modern Greek state built? To what ideas, concepts and practices did the authorities of the new state turn to produce and legitimize its legal and political system? What intellectual and institutional disputes and different reform projects did this process entail? This lecture addresses these questions by looking at nineteenth-century Greek liberalism and the ways in which it engaged in reforms in the Greek state after independence from the Ottomans (ca. 1830-1880). By focusing on the thought and actions of a group of legal scholars whose influence and public role went far beyond the academy, the lecture challenges some of the assumptions of Western-centric histories of nineteenth-century liberalism.

BIOGRAPHY

Michalis Sotiropoulos, FRHistS, is a historian of modern Europe specializing in the intellectual history of the Greek world in the long nineteenth century. He is currently the 1821 Fellow in Modern Greek Studies at the British School at Athens, while in October 2024, he will join the University of Edinburg as a Lecturer in Modern Greek Studies. Michalis has published on a number of topics, while his monograph Liberalism after the Revolution: The Intellectual Foundations of the Greek State, ca. 1830-1880 was recently published by Cambridge University Press.