CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE GREEKS  

Inaugural Queensland Greek History Conference

22-23 October 2010 

The University of Queensland 

Brisbane, Australia 

CONVENOR

Dr David Pritchard (The University of Queensland)

http://www.arts.uq.edu.au/?page=138090&pid=105822

Registration is now open for the Inaugural Queensland Greek History conference, which will be taking place at The University of Queensland on Friday 22 and Saturday 23 October 2010. The keynote speakers are Professor Vincent Gabrielsen of the University of Copenhagen and Professor Margaret C. Miller of the University of Sydney. The conference will be opened by His Excellency Alexios G. Christopoulos, the Ambassador of Greece to Australia. The theme of this conference is the cultural history of the Greeks and its main sponsor is The University of Queensland Cultural History Project. The other sponsors are the R D Milns Classics and Ancient History Perpetual Fund and the Greek Orthodox Community of St George, Brisbane.

CONFERENCE THEME 

The Inaugural Queensland Greek History Conference showcases the diversity of research on the cultural history of the Greeks which is currently being undertaken in the universities of our region. Thus the program of this conference includes papers on, among other topics, mentalities and collective identities of the Greeks; the impact of these cultural constructions on politics and foreign policy; representations and reminiscences of migration, war and war atrocities; and the reception of the recent or ancient past in subsequent periods of Greek or European history. The conference also seeks to consolidate the ties of solidarity between professional historians of the Greek world and those outside of the research sector with a stake in the language, history or culture of the Greeks from antiquity to the present day.

The writing of the history of the Greeks from ancient to modern times has been profoundly altered by the recent cultural turn in the Humanities. For much of the previous century historians had commonly viewed culture as the product of relations between social classes or of economic conditions, which, they believed, were the primary determinants of reality and historical change. From the early 1970s this primacy of social history began to be challenged. Historians of the ancient and modern worlds showed how conceptions of, for example, social class, national character or sexuality helped to constitute the human behaviours which they purportedly only described. Today many historians widely accept that social reality is largely discursively constituted and turn to the realm of culture for their historical explanations. Historians of the ancient and modern Greeks have been at the forefront of this moving of cultural history from the periphery to the centre of our discipline. 

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS 

Vincent Gabrielsen is Professor in the SAXO Institute at the University of Copenhagen and holds Denmark’s only Chair of Ancient History. His research interests have ranged over the economic, fiscal and social history of classical and hellenistic Greece; the institutional and military history of the classical Athenian democracy; and the histories of Rhodes and the Black Sea in ancient times. Among his books are Remuneration of State Officials in Fourth Century BC Athens (Odense, 1981), Financing the Athenian Fleet: Public Taxation and Social Relations (Baltimore, 1994), The Naval Aristocracy of Hellenistic Rhodes (Aarhus, 1997) and The Black Sea in Antiquity: Regional and Interregional Economic Exchanges (Aarhus, 2007), which he co-edited with J. Lund.

Margaret C. Miller is Arthur and Renee George Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Sydney. Her research interests lie in the social culture of archaic and classical Greece with special attention to exchange between Greece, Anatolia and the ancient Near East in the Achaemenid period. Among her books are Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC (Cambridge, 1997) and The Origins of Theatre in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama (Cambridge, 2007), which she co-edited with E. Csapo. She is at present completing a book on the representation of Persians in Attic art.

GENERAL INFORMATION   

The full program of the Inaugural Queensland Greek History Conference is now available at http://www.arts.uq.edu.au/conference-program-138090. Registration for paper-givers and other delegates is now open. There is a heavily subsidised registration fee for postgraduate and undergraduate students and all of those who register online before 31 August 2010 pay only reduced early-bird rates. Delegates can obtain a hard copy registration form at http://www.arts.uq.edu.au/conference-registration-138090.

Dr David Pritchard

Cultural History Project

Centre for the History of European Discourses

Discipline of Classics and Ancient History

School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics

Faculty of Arts

University of Queensland

Brisbane

QLD 4072

Australia

Telephone: +61 7 3365 3338

Fax: +61 7 3365 1968

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