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The Delphi Academy of European Studies, supported by the Region of Central Greece focuses on the diachronic and synchronic study of European history and culture and the ways in which Europe today responds to the multifaceted challenges of political, economic, and cultural globalisation.

The curriculum and academic function of the Delphi Academy of European Studies is overseen by an international Committee consisting of the following Professors:

Homi Bhabha, (Harvard; former Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center)

Peter Frankopan, (Oxford; Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research)

Michèle Lamont, (Harvard; former Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs)

Spiros Pollalis, (Harvard School of Design)

Panagiotis Roilos, (Harvard; founder of the Academy and chair of the Committee, President of the European Cultural Centre of Delphi)

Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, (Johns Hopkins University)

The Academy offers two-week interdisciplinary, tuition free Seminars at the Centre’s facilities in Delphi. The Seminars, which are taught in English by world renowned scholars, are open mainly to graduate students/PhD candidates but also to qualified undergraduates. The instructors adopt interdisciplinary approaches to their subjects, with a view to addressing the research interests of students in the Humanities as well as the Social Sciences. The Seminars are accompanied by a workshop and/or invited lectures on current political and cultural developments in Europe. 

The overarching topic of the Academy’s Seminar Programme 2023 is Displacement, Migration, Memory.

The Seminars will be offered in June 19-30, 2023.

Programme:

Movement and Morality: Ethical Questionsin Contemporary Forced Migration 

by Matthew J. Gibney, University of Oxford

Seminar description

This course invites students to reflect on a range of moral issues posed by contemporary migration, and especially forced migration. Drawing upon a rich set of background readings, mostly in political philosophy, we will explore together a range of questions including: Are immigration controls inherently unjust? What responsibilities do societies have to refugees? Can human smuggling ever be ethically defensible? Do former colonising countries in the global North have special duties to admit forced migrants? Is the market an acceptable way of distributing responsibilities for refugees between states? Are states ever justified in stripping citizenship from terrorists? These are controversial and important moral questions on which scholars disagree. We will try to reach our own conclusions considering their arguments and our own. 

MATTHEW J. GIBNEY is Elizabeth Colson Professor of Politics and Forced Migration at the University of Oxford, Official Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford, and former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford (2017-2022). He is also Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. He specialises in the political and ethical issues raised by refugees, citizenship, and migration control. Born in Melbourne, Australia, he was educated at Monash University (BEc (Hons) and, as a Commonwealth Scholar, at King’s College, University of Cambridge (MPhil; PhD).

He is the author of many scholarly articles, chapters and books, including The Ethics and Politics of Asylum (2004), Globalizing Rights (2003), which has been translated into Italian and Spanish, The Normative, Historical and Political Contours of Deportation (2013) (edited with Bridget Anderson and Emanuela Paoletti), When States Take Back Rights (2020) (edited with Emilien Fargues and Elke Winter), and (with Randall Hansen) Immigration and Asylum (2005), a three-volume encyclopedia. His latest work, Denationalisation, and the Liberal State, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

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Imaging War, Imagining Peace. Memory, Justice, and Repair

by Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University and Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College

Seminar description

This course explores the ways in which both war and peace have been visually imagined, represented and remembered throughout Europe since the twentieth century, and how those visual practices might be unlearned and reimagined. We will discuss images of wars and their resulting migrations -- from the Armenian genocide to World War I and II, nuclear war and Holocaust, colonial and decolonial wars up to the current war in Ukraine. What do imaginings of war and peace leave out of view? How can we bring both underlying social vulnerability and networks of protest and resistance into greater visibility? How might we revise the nationalist, racialized, and gendered stakes of conflict that war images have helped to create? Can the visual archives of violence, migration and displacement be reframed and re-circulated to shape the potential of justice, cohabitation, and peace more firmly? Our discussions will be based on the close study of essays, films, images, and memorials by, among others, Leni Riefenstahl, Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, Robert Capa, Alain Resnais, Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Georges Didi-Huberman, Michael Rothberg, Irene Kacandes, Mark Mazower, Harun Farocki, Susan Meiselas, Frantz Fanon, Gilo Pontecorvo.

MARIANNE HIRSCH is William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in global perspective. Her books includeFamily Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997), The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012) and the co-edited volume Women Mobilizing Memory (2019). 

LEO SPITZER is K. T. Vernon Professor of History Emeritus and Research Professor, Dartmouth College. A past Guggenheim, National Humanities Center, NEH and ACLS Fellow, he writes about responses to colonialism, cultural “in-betweeness,” generational refugee memory, and traumatic witnessing and its transmission. His books include Lives in Between: The Experience of Marginality in a Century of Emancipation (1989), Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (1998), and the co-edited volume Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (1999). 

Hirsch and Spitzer have co-authored two books: Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010) and School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (2020).

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Upon completion of the Seminar Programme, certificates indicating the titles of the seminars and the names of the instructors will be awarded to the students.  

Students will be offered free lodging and meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) by the Academy at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi. The Seminar Programme is tuition-free.

Applicants to the Academy should submit the following documents:

1) CV (no more than 3 pages).

2) Research statement no longer than 200 words.

3) Two letters of recommendation (one from the applicant's PhD/academic advisor, in the case of graduate students). The letters should include information about the applicant's coursework and academic performance in areas related to the topics of the seminars.

4) Proof of English language competence.

Applications should be submitted to the European Cultural Centre of Delphi (Mrs. Athena Gotsi, conferences2@eccd.gr) by March 31, 2023.

Decisions will be communicated to the applicants by April 20, 2023.

Successful applicants who accept the Delphi Academy's offer are expected to contribute the non-refundable registration fee of 150 euros to the European Cultural Centre of Delphi as a token of their commitment to participate in the Seminar Programme. This amount will also secure their attendance at other possible concurrent events organised by the Centre, including e.g., the Delphi Dialogues.