Dates: Friday, April 24 and Monday, April 27
Time: On both days the talks will be from 11:00am until 12:30pm EDT
Location: Zoom and the Center for Hellenic Studies
3100 Whitehaven St. NW, Washington DC 20008
Over the course of two days, our Early Career Fellows in Hellenic Studies will be presenting their research during their visit to Washington, DC. Please join us on Zoom by registering for the respective date below. If you would like to join in person, please contact events@chs.harvard.edu as space is limited.
Abstracts for Friday, April 24
11:00–11:30
Ermioni Prokopaki, Early Career Fellow in Hellenic Studies 2025–26
Ancient Philosophy Scholar, Fellow at the University of Chicago. Read more about Ermioni in this link.
Presentation title: “Plato & Aristotle on the Intersection of Epistemology and the Philosophy of Mind”
My research focuses on the conception of the human capacity for truth-telling. Plato’s Theaetetus argues that unless we can see clearly that the capacity for judgment is teleologically structured with an aim for the truth, we will not be able to defend the coherence of the concept of knowledge against the threats of relativism. Looking at an under-examined passage of the Theaetetus, I argue that Plato uses the concept of the future as a misnomer for the notion that our judgments are necessarily subject to truth-conditions because they inherently aim at the truth. In doing so, I explain that Plato is not concerned with the knower’s capacity for predictions as it is often thought. Turning to Aristotle’s De Anima, his treatise on the soul or mind, which is conspicuously inspired by the Theaetetus, I argue that the mechanics of judgment outlined there fail to show our capacity to be oriented to the truth, primarily due to the role of phantasia (imagination) and Aristotle’s assumption of logical atomism.
11:30–12:00
Giorgios Mouratidis, Early Career Fellow in Hellenic Studies 2025–26
Ancient Historian, Assistant Director at the British School at Athens. Read more about Giorgios in this link.
Presentation title: “The Spatial and Sociopolitical Context of Athletic Inscriptions in the Sanctuary of Olympia during the Hellenistic and Imperial Periods”
Athletic monuments were erected in great numbers in cities in eastern Mediterranean, and especially in big Panhellenic sanctuaries, such as Olympia and Delphi. From a modern point of view, it is easy to underestimate the density of honorific statues, their effect on the city’s landscape, and their powerful impact on those who viewed them. The huge variety of different views about athletics was partly a result of the large number of viewers in regular contact with these athletic images. Some scholars have begun to see how that ever-present quality is a factor in the variety of athletic opinions, but that work only scratches the surface of the epigraphic material. Even though in recent years, epigraphists have moved the scholarly discussion about the materiality of texts intelligently forward, such studies rarely take into consideration the wealth of athletic inscriptions, making reference to this material only in passing, if at all. This paper builds on earlier scholarship, but offers a new way to read athletic inscriptions, in the process also revealing conceptual links among art, epigraphy, and literature, as well as among cities and Panhellenic sanctuaries.
12:00–12:30
Özge Acar, Early Career Fellow in Hellenic Studies 2025–26
Ancient Historian, Independent Researcher. Read more about Özge in this link.
Presentation title: “τό ἡμέτερον ἦθος: Honorific Practices and Identity at Halikarnassos”
This paper examines how Halikarnassos constructs its local identity and ethos through honorific practices. It focuses on a second-century CE inscription (I.Aphrodisias 12.27.ii.)—a text that consciously articulates the city’s cultural values. Considered alongside other epigraphic and archaeological evidence, this honorific act reflects Halikarnassos’ long-standing paideia-centered identity.
Abstracts for Monday, April 27
11:00–11:30
Aikaterini Peppa, Early Career Fellow in Hellenic Studies 2025–26
Byzantine Archaeologist, Archivist at the French School at Athens. Read more about Aikaterini in this link.
Presentation title: “Κεραμέως πλοῦτος: Potters and Pottery Makers in the Medieval Period”
Despite the fundamental importance of pottery for understanding past societies, the people involved in its production remain understudied, particularly in medieval historiography. The sources provide only fragmentary evidence, often leaving the pottery makers in the background, which highlights the need to consider the factors that contributed to their limited representation in the historical record. At the same time, different types of ceramics were shaped by the socio-economic position of producers and users, as well as by the wider economic environment in which they operated.
11:30–12:00
Yannis Stamos, Early Career Fellow in Hellenic Studies 2025–26
Cultural and Intellectual Historian-Philologist, Adjunct Faculty at the Department of Language and Intercultural Studies, University of Thessaly. Read more about Yannis in this link.
Presentation title: “Antiquity at the Service of Dictatorship: The Greek Pavilion in the 1939 New York World’s Fair”
The presentation will explore the 4 August regime’s use of antiquity in the New York World’s Fair. Linking past and present in an ambitious modernist project, the dictatorship promoted both modern Greece as the legitimate heir to ancient Greek heritage and itself as its legitimate government. Antiquity dominated the pavilion, but its curation and integration with new creations advanced a vision of “Greek Hellenism,” intended to supersede dominant conceptions of Hellenism shaped in the West.
12:00–12:30
Michail I. Marinis, Early Career Fellow in Hellenic Studies 2025–26
Linguist, Fellow at the Ohio State University. Read more about Michail in this link.
Presentation title: “When the Previously Different Become Identical”
This talk presents a comprehensive diachronic and diatopic survey of the Greek nominal inflectional system from antiquity to the present day, with particular attention to case syncretism (ψυχή.F.NOM.SG. = ψυχή.F.ACC.SG.) and its structural interaction with the reorganization of inflectional paradigms. I argue that Greek has sustained, across both time and dialect geography, a substantial and systematic reduction of morphological information at the level of nominal inflection: distinctions once robustly encoded in surface morphology (e.g. μήτηρ.F.NOM.SG. ≠ μητέρα.F.ACC.SG.) have been progressively neutralized, yielding paradigmatic identities of the sort μητέρα.F.NOM.SG. = μητέρα.F.ACC.SG. The dominant syncretic pattern—the nominative-accusative merger—is shown (Marinis 2024: 548–549) to be advancing inter-paradigmatically with increasing systematicity. I further argue that the primary determinant governing the distribution of syncretic patterns is grammatical gender, with inflectional class membership constituting a secondary conditioning factor. In closing, I propose inter-paradigmatic similarity as a novel yet theoretically consequential variable—one conspicuously underexplored in the existing literature—that operates as a structural brake on the further expansion of syncretism within the paradigm.