Modern Antiquity: Beyond the Battles of the Ancients and Moderns

HELLENIC STUDIES SEMINAR SERIES

When:
Thursday, February 6, 2025 | 18:00 – 20:00

Where:
Deree Faculty Lounge, The American College of Greece

Organized by:
The Institute of Hellenic Culture and the Liberal Arts – The American College of Greece

Speaker:
Georgia Giannakopoulou
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Deree – The American College of Greece

About the seminar:

Based on Building Modern Antiquity – Hymns and Laments for Athens (Georgia Giannakopoulou, Routledge, Taylor & Francis 2025), and grounded on Nietzsche’s critique of metropolitan modernity, this paper introduces modern antiquity as the hidden element in the dialectic between the past and the present. In briefly surveying the centuries-long battles between the ancients and the moderns that gradually highlighted Periclean Athens as the “golden century” with which many moderns compared and contrasted their present, the paper highlights the mutilation of antiquity for the glorification of a socially-constructed image of the past that served the interests of European capitalist metropolitan modernity.

About the speaker:

Georgia Giannakopoulou is an Assistant Professor at Deree – The American College of Greece and Fellow of the IHCLA. She is the Director of the ACG International Honors Program and specializes in classical and critical social and sociological theory. Her research interests include the critiques of metropolitan modernity and the sociological study of architecture. Her latest publications include the festschrift on David Frisby entitled The Detective of Modernity – Essays on the Work of David Frisby (co-ed with Graeme Gilloch), and Building Modern Antiquity: Hymns and Laments for Athens, Routledge/Taylor & Francis.