The School of History, Classics and Archaeology is hosting the launch of the A. G. Leventis Centre in Greek Studies on the 13th of November, 2025 from 14:00 to 19:30. This launch is part of the 2025 Leventis Conference Telling Bodies: A Conference on Corporeal Classical Reception, held by the A. G. Leventis Visiting Professorship in Greek Studies. The Conference will be discussing the following questions:
What happens if we centre the body in classical reception studies? What tales does the body tell? And what tales are told about the body?
Think of the classical statues we have in our own SRR— are they just objects or places for meaning-making?
The A. G. Leventis Centre in Greek Studies seeks to ‘promote the study of Greek culture in its manifold aspects from antiquity to the present’. The Greek world has always held centre stage in classical and historical studies of antiquity; the Centre for Greek Studies places this Greek world beyond Classical studies, beyond the limits of a specific period, or to a specific field: the Centre ‘[encourages] novel—interdisciplinary and/or diachronic— approaches.’
The namesake of the Centre is Anastasios George Leventis, a Greek Cypriot businessman. In 1979, the A. G. Leventis Foundation was established posthumously by Leventis’ nephew. The Foundation focuses on celebrating and remembering the cultural heritage of Cyprus and Greece, and is the sponsor of the University of Edinburgh’s Visiting Professorship in Greek Studies since 1997.
For those interested in the history of the Greek world— Ancient, Byzantine, and/or Modern— this Centre is quite exciting news. In the spirit of the launch, come and take a look at the SRR’s collections Greek history. Aside from our endless shelves on Classical Greece (from Art and Archaeology, to our extensive Loeb collection), we have a shelf on the Byzantine world as well as some books on modern Greek history in the Jim McMillan Collection on European Studies.
The Jim McMillan Collection houses a couple of books on modern Greek studies. To begin, Richard Clogg’s ‘Modern Greece’ which surveys the history of Greek people from the end of the Byzantine Empire to the late 20th century, provides a great overview on the Greek world and its people post-Byzantine Empire. For a localised and anthropological study of the Greeks see John Kennedy Campbell’s ‘Honour, Family, and Patronage’, which examines the Greek mountain community of Sarakatsani shepherds and their moral values and institutions. To those interested in the Second World War, look for ‘Inside Hitler’s Greece’ by Mark Mazower, an account of ordinary people experiencing Nazi Occupation in wartime Greece.
The above books only further illustrate the diverse, varied, and interdisciplinary field that is Greek Studies. I encourage you all to think beyond established centres of knowledge and frameworks (whether that is periodisation or fields of study) and see in what different ways history and the history of a people can be approached and thought of!
