About the Thalia Potamianos Annual Lecture Series
Established in June 2020, the Thalia Potamianos Annual Lectures Series on the Impact of Greek Culture seeks to create a stimulating environment to draw both the academic community and the general public to the Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
The Thalia Potamianos lectures are being made possible by a generous grant from Phokion Potamianos, an Overseer of the Gennadius Library. Mr. Potamianos named the series in memory of his grandmother, a distinguished Greek doctor, academic, and philanthropist. This series of lectures aim to examine the role that Greece, Greek culture, literature, and language have played over the course of more than two and a half millennia. Rather than exploring the familiar and limited Mediterranean context, they are looked at from a global perspective, allowing not only a better understanding of world history but of Greece itself.
Every year, a highly distinguished, internationally renowned scholar will be selected to conduct research and develop programs on a topic relevant to the Gennadius Library. The research will culminate in a minimum of three annual public “keystone” lectures, which will be delivered at Athens, Greece and the United States. These talks will be accompanied by publications, podcasts, and other appropriate media to maximize exposure and engagement.
Peter Frankopan’s Selection as Inaugural Speaker
Dr. Peter Frankopan has been selected as the inaugural speaker. His first lecture entitled “Greece: Beginnings” was delivered on October 7, 2021 in the American School’s auditorium Cotsen Hall and covered the period c.7000BC-end of the classical world. The second lecture “Greece: Legacies” will cover the period from c.630-c.1600 and will be delivered on March 16, 2022, Washington, D.C. (venue to be determined), while the third and final “Greece: Futures” will cover the period from 1600 to the present day and take place on May 10, 2022 at St. Bartholomew’s Church, New York City.
Talks Summary
The story of Greece and the Greeks has been told for thousands of years by some of the most important and elegant voices in human history: poets, philosophers and scholars thought deeply about how and why a culture in the Aegean became so vibrant and successful. These voices all had one thing in common. They looked at their own world from the inside out; some, like Herodotus, took a great interest in other parts of the world. But for many, the non-Hellenic world was one of threats and dangers, of rivalry.
These lectures will tell a different story of Hellenic civilisation. They will look at the connections, that mean we should understand Greece and Greek culture within a much wider context, linked to Africa, to the Middle East and to Asia. They will explore how Greek ideas and thought were formed by influences, borrowings and competition from other cultures – and equally, how others borrowed from Greece, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. The talks will paint the history of Greece and its peoples on a canvas covering thousands of years, from the Neolithic to the classical world, from Byzantium to the 21st century. In doing so, it will consider the importance of the role of warfare, of inequality and gender, of climate change, pandemic disease, and of course arts and culture.
About Dr. Peter Frankopan
Peter Frankopan’s academic interests include the history of the Byzantine Empire, Eastern Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and China. His book The First Crusade: The Call from the East looks at the Crusades not from the perspective of the Latin West but of Constantinople and Byzantium. It was described as making “the most significant contribution to rethinking the origins and course of the First Crusade for a generation” (TLS). This followed on from Dr. Frankopan’s translation of The Alexiad (Penguin Classics, 2009) by Anna Komnene, perhaps the most famous of all Byzantine histories.
His book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World was described as “magnificent” (Sunday Times) and “not just the most important history book in years, but the most important in decades” (Berliner Zeitung). A New York Times Best Seller, it has topped the non-fiction charts all around the world, including in the U.K., India, and China. It was also named Daily Telegraph’s History Book of the Year and one of Sunday Times’ books of the decade (2010–2019).
Dr. Frankopan’s most recent book, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World, is a “masterly mapping out of a new world order” (Evening Standard). In 2019, it was awarded the Carical Prize for Social Sciences in Italy, when Dr. Frankopan also won Germany’s prestigious Calliope Prize.
Dr. Frankopan advises governments, inter-government agencies, and multi-lateral organizations about the past, present, and future, including UNIDO, UNESCO, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank. He writes regularly in the national and international press about history and its relevance to understanding the world around us.
In 2019, Dr. Frankopan was named one of the “World’s 50 Top Thinkers” by Prospect Magazine. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Royal Geographic Society, the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Royal Society of Arts. He has been President of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs since 2020.
