Title: Universal Liberal
Democracy, Global Capitalism and Hellenism at the End of History
Speaker: Dr. Despina Lalaki, Marilena Laskaridis Visiting Research Fellow in Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam (2020-2021)
Time: 3.30 pm.
Location: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/85042839171
(Meeting ID: 850 4283 9171)
Language: English
This event is also supported by Decolonizing Hellas (dëcoloиıze hellάş)
Abstract
To this day, Hellenism, a term largely used to describe the confluence of ancient Greek culture with Western modernity, conditions our cultural dispositions and political imagination. The paper explores its social history at the second half of the twentieth century at the trajectory of the post war Greek state re-building, cultural internationalism and market networks.
Bio
Despina Lalaki is a sociologist who works in the areas of historical and cultural sociology, social theory, American and Modern Greek Studies. For the current academic year, she is a Marilena Laskaridis Visiting Research Fellow in Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Previously she held the M. Alison Frantz Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2019-2020. She has held teaching and research positions at the City University of New York-CUNY, New York University-NYU and the New School University, where she completed her Ph.D. in sociology. She has also studied History of Art and Architecture at SUNY-Binghamton University (M.A.) and Archaeology and Art History at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece (B.A.). Her publications include several articles in collective volumes and peer-reviewed journals while she often writes for non-academic audiences. Currently, she co-edits with Christos Mais a book entitled The Battle of Ideas. Cultural Cold War and the Making of Liberal Democracy in Greece, expected to be published in 2021 by Ψηφίδες publisher and she works on her monograph, Digging for Democracy in Greece. Intra-Civilizational Processes During the American Century.