Hellenic studies

Prominent professor and Hellenist Roderick Beaton took the oath to become a Greek citizen at a ceremony held at the Bank of Greece on Tuesday.

Greece is these days discovering how important the Greek expat community is for national interests, especially in the United States.

We are not talking about large crowds of people or huge financial contributions. And yet, a few Greek Americans, working with some top members of Congress, have made a difference.

The American Hellenic Institute Foundation (AHIF) has joined with the Center for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at Queens College as co-publisher of the Journal of Modern Hellenism.

The Hellenic American Leadership Council (HALC) announced a $1 million grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF). The grant will endow HALC's  Leadership 2030 FellowshipProgram, in honor of the late Nikos Mouyiaris. The program will be renamed the Nikos Mouyiaris Leadership 2030 Fellowship Program, supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

By Marni Papamatthaiou

The viability of Modern Greek Studies programmes at universities around the world has been an issue for decades.

How can about 200 programmes for the teaching and dissemination of Greek language and culture - 65 of them incorporated in the classics departments of universities - survive when the Greek state does nothing whatsoever to support them?

"Adoption, Memory and Cold War Greece" is the subject of a lecture that Gonda Van Steen, a professor at King's College, London, will deliver at the British School library on Wednesday, April 3. Van Steen is the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, and director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. The Athens lecture starts at 7 p.m.

Dimitri Gondicas speaks passionately but modestly when discussing the new branch of Princeton University's Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies in Athens.

Gondicas has been at Princeton since the 1970s, first as a student of physics and then as a lecturer in Modern Greek, going on to become the director of the Seeger Center of Hellenic Studies in 2010.