1821: The Migration of Revolutionary Ideas

First of two panel discussions chaired by Roderick Beaton, Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, King’s College London, co-organised with the British School at Athens.

Ideas about making a revolution – ideas that are in themselves revolutionary: these two back-to-back panel discussions, one in Athens, the other in London, will revolve around both concepts, as ways of understanding the outbreak of revolution by Orthodox Christian, Greek-speaking subjects of the Ottoman empire in the spring of 1821, that would lead to the creation of Greece as a modern nation-state in 1830.

Speakers will focus on the transmission, or ‘migration’, of such ideas across the European continent in the wake of 1789 Revolution in France and their impact in creating the climate in which a Greek revolution became possible in 1821.

• Ada Dialla: ‘The Revolutionary Idea of Human Rights and the Greek 1821’
• Efi Gazi: ‘Ελευθερία ή Θάνατος: Migrant Ideas, Travelling Concepts and Changing Political Languages in the Age of the Greek Revolution’
• Kostas Tampakis: ‘“A slight idea of Physics” – Revolutionary Ideas and the Natural Sciences before and after the Founding of the Greek State’

This is the first in a two-part series and will begin at 17.00-19.00 (UK) and 19.00-21.00 (Greece). For more information, please visit https://21in21.co.uk/events/. 

To attend this event, please register your interest beforehand.

Speaker Bio

Ada Dialla is Associate Professor of European and Russian History at the Department of Theory and History of Art, School of Fine Arts (Athens) and until recently was chair of the Department. She was a visiting researcher at the Russian Academy of Science (St Petersburg), at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and at the Jordan Center for Advanced Studies in Russia of New York University. She is a member of the Scientific Committee and the Editorial Board of the journal Historian. A Review of the Past and Other Stories. She is a founding member and chairman of the Athens based Governing Board of the Research Center for the Humanities. Her recent book is co-authored with Alexis Heraclides and is entitled Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century. Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

Efi Gazi is Associate Professor of Modern History in the Social and Education Policy Department, University of the Peloponnese (Greece). She studied history at the Universities of Athens (Greece) and Essex (UK). She received her PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (1997) and conducted post-doctoral research at Princeton University (USA). She has taught at the Universities of Athens (GR), Crete (GR), Thessaly (GR) and Brown (USA). Her publications include Scientific National History. The Greek Case in Comparative Perspective (2000), The Second Life of the Three Hierarchs. A Genealogy of the “Helleno-Christian Civilization” (in Greek, 2004), ‘Fatherland, Religion, Family’. History of a Slogan (1880-1930) (in Greek, 2011), Unknown Land. Ideas about Greece and Europe in the beginning of the 20th century (in Greek, forthcoming 2020). She has published articles and essays on the history and theory of historiography, intellectual and cultural history, public history.

Kostas Tampakis is an Associate Researcher in the Sector of Neohellenic Research, Institute of Historical Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation. After completing his PhD in the History of Science in the University of Athens, he has been a Visiting Scholar in the History and Philosophy of Science Department, University of Cambridge, a Research Associate in Darwin College, University of Cambridge and the Ted and Elaine Athanassiades Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University. His research interests include the cultural and social history of science in the Modern Greek State, the history of the relations of Science and Orthodox Christianity and Science and Literature.