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9 February 2026, 17:00 (UK), 19:00 (Greece): Online panel co-hosted by the CHS-BSA on: ‘Translation and the Magnitude of Historical Figures’, chaired by Prof. Emeritus David Ricks. Speakers: John Stathatos, Vassilis Letsios, and Joshua Barley, on Michalis Ganas and translation.
More information and registration:
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11 March 2026: Strand S3.30, Seminars, 15:00-17:00: 2 seminar presentations, 20 minutes each, followed by Q & A:
Dr Maria Kouvari: ‘Values Beyond Preservation: Reassessing the Built Heritage of Swiss Humanitarian Aid in Greece’
Abstract: A post-war barrack hut, now in an advanced state of disrepair, stands on the banks of Lake Ziros near Preveza, Greece. Dating to 1946, it was transferred from Switzerland as part of a Swiss humanitarian aid project to establish a children’s village at Ziros, which was later developed into a children’s town under the auspices of the Royal Greek charitable funds. This post-war relic bears witness to the transnational history of Swiss humanitarian aid in the immediate postwar years and serves as a place of memory for former child residents. The presentation reconstructs the hut’s history within the broader context of Swiss relief initiatives across postwar Europe and reassesses its heritage value today. It discusses how values and meanings have been produced, contested, and re-ascribed in built heritage over time. It highlights overlooked dimensions of this heritage: first, by centring the memories of former residents and conceptualising the site as a geography of childhood; and secondly, by framing the hut as shared built heritage across heritage communities and national contexts. The discussion engages contemporary debates in heritage studies that revolve around transnational perspectives, underrepresented geographies, and notions of identity, memory, and minority.
Barrack hut at Ziros, Preveza, Greece. Photograph by Maria Kouvari, 2023
Bio: Maria Kouvari is an architect and architectural historian with a PhD from ETH Zurich. Her current research concerns transnational histories and underrepresented geographies. Her doctoral dissertation, titled ‘Minor/s’ Heritage’, has been awarded grants from the Sophie Afenduli Fondation and the Foundation for Education and European Culture. Kouvari is the founder and coordinator of ‘Children Matter,’ a working group within the European Architectural History Network (EAHN).
2) Dr Fiona Antonelaki: ‘Fifteen-minute Tales: Mythology Retellings on the BBC Greek-language Programmes’
Abstract: ‘You cannot imagine how much you can fit into a fifteen-minute broadcast slot’, wrote the poet Nanos Valaoritis in 1947, when he became a regular contributor to the BBC Greek-language radio programmes. This paper revisits the original radio works written by a vibrant group of Greek intellectuals who worked for the BBC in the aftermath of World War II. It focuses on radio adaptations of ancient Greek myths (e.g., Perseus and Andromeda, Theseus, Helen of Troy), aired between 1946 and 1951. What distinguished the Greek-language adaptations of these myths from the contemporaneous Greek-themed radio plays aired on the BBC’s domestic services? In what ways was the radio version of these stories influenced by their treatment, sometimes even by the same authors, in other media and art forms (e.g., poetry, theatre, cinema)? As the original audio files of the radio programmes in question have not been preserved, this paper is based on the study of unpublished broadcast scripts stored at the BBC Written Archives Centre.
Perseus and Andromeda, 1936, David Gascoyne. © The estate of David Gascoyne. Photo: Tate.
Bio: Fiona Antonelaki is a postdoctoral researcher at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is the principal investigator of the research project ‘Reading Poetry Aloud: Education, Culture and the Media in Greece, 1930-1960’, funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation. She studied history and archaeology at the University of Athens and Modern Greek literature at King’s College London (Ph.D. 2018). Her research focuses on modern Greek literature and/in performance, with a special interest in radio and audio cultures, and the relationship between literary modernism and popular culture. She has held research and teaching positions at Princeton University, the University of Thessaly, the University of Padua, and the University of Cambridge. She is reviews co-editor for the Journal of Greek Media & Culture.
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12 March 2026, Great Hall, King’s Strand Campus, 18:00: 11th Rumble Fund Lecture in Classical Art (in-person only; not streamed)
Speaker: Sir Grayson Perry on ‘Why I Hate Classical Civilisation‘
Abstract: I was stopped by a random man in the street who asked me if I wanted to give the Rumble lecture. He said it had to be on a subject related to Graeco-Roman culture. I said I had an antipathy to classical civilisation. He said, ‘Great, make it about that’. Of course he only asked me because I am a minor celebrity and that it might bring a little publicity and glamour to this obscure corner of the further education industrial complex.
I thought it might be interesting to unpick why exactly I have such an allergy to Kraters and Petrarch. I start from a place of complete ignorance and have no ambition to go anywhere else. I tried to get AI to write this abstract but it was useless which made me think maybe I was on to something! My dislike of ancient Greece and Rome is not necessarily aligned to any fashionable ideological causes. The classics are often used to bolster or lend credibility to a right wing, authoritarian, patriarchal, Eurocentric, white supremacist view of the world, but that is not principally why I dislike them. For me it is more personal, more irrational, more enjoyable. I love a good grievance.
Bio: Sir Grayson Perry is a Turner Prize winning contemporary artist, Bafta winning broadcaster, member of the Royal Academy, former trustee of the British Museum, and winner of the Erasmus Prize. He also performs live touring one-man stage shows.
To register, click here:
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/kingsartshums/2035595
Please direct all questions to will.wootton@kcl.ac.uk
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16, 17, and 18 March 2026, Council Room KIN214, King’s Strand Campus, 19:00-20:15:
Professor Emerita Judith Herrin: A trilogy of lectures on three consecutive evenings on the topic of ‘Before “East” and “West”‘. Professor Herrin will speak on the topic of the centrality of Byzantium in the Mediterranean world of Early Christendom, through its metropolis, Constantinople, the vital role played by women in its continuity, and the lasting significance of its name.
Abstract: Prof. Herrin argues that Rome did not ‘fall’, it moved. In doing so it became something unique in Byzantium. Byzantium was central to the creation of the medieval world in Western Europe as well as Islamic Africa and what we now call the ‘Middle East’. The first lecture focuses on Constantinople (now Istanbul) and its imperial court: a permanent, unmoving capital for over a millennium and a magnet for merchants, pilgrims and diplomats. In the second lecture, she shows why the structural importance of women in the way Byzantium was ruled–which she calls ‘the imperial feminine’–was a crucial contribution to its lengthy survival and capacity to change. In the final lecture, ‘I’m more polemical’, she says, ‘about those who want to drop the name Byzantium’, again stressing its unique combination of Greek, Roman and Christian cultures.
Photo credit: Scarlett Freund
About the speaker: Judith Herrin is the author of The Formation of Christendom (recently republished as a Princeton Classic); Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe; Byzantium, the Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire; and Women in Purple; as well as two collections of historical essays: Unrivalled Influence and Margins and Metropolis. After a long career teaching Byzantine and medieval history, notably at Princeton University and King’s College London, Herrin retired to pursue research, which is currently centred on the city of Ravenna and its anonymous Cosmographer. She is attached to the Wittgenstein Project Moving Byzantium, based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, and maintains continuing membership of various editorial and advisory boards. She was elected President of the Association Internationale des Etudes Byzantines, 2011-12, and is the Founding Editor of Translated Texts for Byzantinists series published by Liverpool University Press.
About the lectures: Professor Herrin’s lectures will be a revised version of the Lawrence Stone lectures, which she gave at Princeton University in the spring of 2025. The Lawrence Stone lectures are an annual event arranged by the Shelby Cullom Davis Center and the History Department of Princeton University in honour of the historian who did so much to establish the Center, which continues to encourage and foster some of the most exciting and innovative developments in historical research. Princeton University Press publishes the lectures in a dedicated series: https://press.princeton.edu/series/the-lawrence-stone-lectures?srsltid=AfmBOopaN1NKOhkBeeOahUaEa_Ix7N0Ia2WFu260XtXecky1nM0aCC8P.
Dr James Corke-Webster, Head of the Department of Classics, will introduce the speaker.
Seating is limited to 60 people, and priority will be given to people who can attend all three lectures. Please contact gonda.van_steen@kcl.ac.uk to reserve your seat.
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18 March 2026: KIN 628, 17:30-19:00: Launch of The War for Anatolia and the Remaking of International Order: Greece, Turkey and the End of the First World War, co-edited by Georgios Giannakopoulos, Joseph A. Maiolo, and Gonda Van Steen (Bloomsbury) https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/war-for-anatolia-and-the-remaking-of-international-order-9781350420953/
Please see below for the relevant links and do help us spread the news to interested colleagues/students.
King’s event page:
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/book-launch-the-war-for-anatolia-and-the-remaking-of-international-order-greece-turkey-and-the-end-of-the-first-world-war
Eventbrite page:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-launch-the-war-for-anatolia-and-the-remaking-of-international-order-tickets-1982294557383?aff=oddtdtcreator
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19 March 2026, Bush House (NE) -1.01: 18:30-20:00: A book presentation by Prof. Gail Holst Warhaft, My Father and the Silver King (Colenso Books), introduced by Dr Anthony Hirst and Timothy Ashplant (KCL)
Picture: Gail Holst Warhaft and Thanasis Athanasiou singing.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/gail-holst-warhaft-and-anthony-hirst-book-presentation-tickets-1981963048832?aff=oddtdtcreator
Teaser: ‘I was living in Greece when my father died. He had visited me there and impressed the Greeks by dancing in a taverna. I often wonder how much of my interest in the Greek music of the 1920s and 30s I owed to my father and to the Music Hall songs he sang to me as a child. His life was, of course, a rags-to-riches story not so uncommon in his day, but writing his story I came to see what an unusual and daring man he had been. One of the most intelligent things he did, perhaps, was to marry my studious, bookish mother, a marriage that turned out to be as successful as any of his other ventures.’
Bio: Gail Holst-Warhaft was born in Australia but lived in Greece before settling in Ithaca, NY. While researching her books on Greek music she played in the orchestras of Mikis Theodorakis, Dionysis Savvopoulos, and Mariza Koch. A poet, translator, musician, and professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, Holst-Warhaft’s books include The Fall of Athens (poems and prose memoir); Penelope’s Confession (poems); The Collected Poems of Nikos Kavadias (translations); The House with the Scorpions: Selected Poems and Song Lyrics of Mikis Theodorakis (translations); The Cue for Passion: Grief and its Political Uses; Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature; Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music; Road to Rembetika: Music of a Greek Sub-culture. Her poems and translations from Greek, French, and Anglo-Saxon have been published in many journals and anthologies including Literary Imagination, Per Contra, Translation, Southerly, Antipodes and Stand. She was poet laureate of Tompkins County for 2011 and 2012. Holst-Warhaft’s second collection of poems, Lucky Country, was published by Fomite in 2018. Nisiotika: Music, Dances, and Bitter-sweet Songs of the Aegean Islands was published in 2021 by Denise Harvey, and Ταξίδι στο ρεμπέτικο για μικρούς και μεγάλους (a children’s book about rembetika, was published in 2022 (in Greek). Her most recent books are Theodorakis, His Music and Politics (Cambridge Scholars’ Press, 2023) and My Father and the Silver King, (Colenso Books, 2026).
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23 March 2026, Bush House Lecture Theatre 1 (BH S1.01): 19:00-20:30: Book launch of Sir Roderick Beaton‘s latest book: Europe
Abstract: What do we think we mean by ‘Europe’? If it cannot be defined by geography alone, is it bound by history, by its politics, by a shared culture? In this perception-changing book, historian Roderick Beaton reconfigures the entire history of Europe, from its distant beginnings to today, as the story of an idea.
Since its birth in ancient Greece, Europe has been defined, and redefined, by its people. Through this powerful lens, Beaton deftly surveys Europe’s major historical developments over 2,500 years, ending with the war in Ukraine. His focus is not on regions or nation states, but always on the continent as a whole, so that it appears in the sharpest outline. Throughout, Europe: A New History draws on original sources to allow the voices of the past, from Tacitus to Thatcher, to speak for themselves.
The story of Europe’s people is, Beaton shows us, as much about shared, and changing, identities as about great or wicked deeds, pitched battles, invasions or revolutions. Exploring the multilayered identities that have always come with being European, this wise, vital work places the Europe of today in the long arc of history, and lets us see it anew.
For more about the book, click here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/132124/roderick-beaton
To register, click here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1977022348063?aff=oddtdtcreator
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Until 29 March 2026: Exhibition opening at Sissinghurst Castle Garden (National Trust):
CHS is a co-sponsor of the special exhibition that opens at Sissinghurst Castle Garden on 18 October, called ‘Passion and Politics: Sissinghurst and Greece’ (until 29 March 2026). The exhibition highlights the Greek connections of diplomat Harold Nicolson and his wife Vita Sackville-West: ‘For the first time, diplomat Harold Nicolson’s role in the fortunes of post-war Greece takes centre stage in this brand-new exhibition at Sissinghurst. Untold stories, unseen photographs and personal mementoes shine a light on his life, work, and the inspirations behind the design of his iconic home at Sissinghurst’. See https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/kent/sissinghurst-castle-garden/events/e4ff459b-3116-4d67-9767-ea0a2b57276c.
Our colleague Dr Rebecca Levitan inspecting one of the Greek antiquities in the gardens of Sissinghurst Castle (with permission to jump over the rope).
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18 May 2026, Council Room (KIN214), 18:00-20:00: TBC
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9 June 2026, Great Hall, King’s Strand Campus, 19:00-21:00: Runciman Award Ceremony: An evening dedicated to good books, Anglo-Hellenic friendship relations, and an incisive lecture.
Co-hosted with the Anglo-Hellenic League. The Runciman Award and Ceremony are generously sponsored by the A.G. Leventis Foundation and the Athanasios C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation.
Speaker: Kallia Papadaki (https://euprizeliterature.eu/en/prize-author/kallia-papadaki/)
Register here:
For online attendance via Zoom, pursue the links via the AHL website: anglohellenicleague.org/events
Abstract:
About the speaker:
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10 June 2026, Council Room (KIN214), King’s Strand Campus, 18:00-20:00: Award Ceremonies:
Katie Lentakis Memorial Fund Award and Fourth Mary Margaret McCabe Dissertation Prize in Ancient Philosophy, in partnership with King’s CHS and Classics Department, the Anglo-Hellenic League, and the Foundation for Platonic Studies.
Speaker: Professor Melissa Lane (Princeton University), whose presentation titled ‘Plato’s Republic on Motivating (Ecological) Guardianship’, draws on Plato’s Republic to explore how people can be educated so as to truly care about what is right to do, bringing this perspective to bear on the challenges of ecology.
Register here:
Abstract: In Eco-Republic (published in the UK in 2011 and in the US in 2012), I drew on Plato’s Republic as a template for the kind of virtue ethics and politics that an environmentally sustainable society would require. On Plato’s view, people who truly know what it is right to do – in this case, what sustainability demands – would thereby be motivated to pursue it. But as environmental crises deepen, the gap between knowledge and motivation seems only to widen. In this talk, I return to the Republic to explore how Plato envisions that people can be educated so as to truly care about what it is right to do, bringing this perspective to bear on the challenges of ecology.
About the speaker: Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where she is also Associated Faculty in Classics and in Philosophy, and has received the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Stanley J. Kelley Teaching Award of the Department of Politics, and the Faculty Community Engagement Award of the Pace Center for Civic Engagement. She currently also holds a three-year appointment dedicated to delivering periodic public lectures in London as the fiftieth Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College. She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Classics, as well as fellowships and visiting professorships at a number of institutions including the ANU, Auckland, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the American Academy in Rome, and the École Normale Supérieure. Professor Lane was educated in Californian public schools, then at Harvard University (graduating summa cum laude and being named a Truman Scholar and Marshall Scholar), and then at the University of Cambridge, where she received an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy and then taught for fifteen years before moving to Princeton in 2009. Her most recent monograph, titled Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political and published in 2023 by Princeton University Press, was awarded the 2024 Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy; her 2012 PUP monograph, Eco-Republic, continues to be widely discussed. The only person ever to have delivered both the Carlyle Lectures and the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at the University of Oxford, Professor Lane has appeared multiple times on ‘In Our Time’ on BBC Radio Four, and has been published in periodicals in the US, UK, Italy and Germany.
Photo credit: Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy
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2026-2027 Academic Year
5 October 2026, King’s Strand campus, River Room (KIN227), 18:00-29.15: Lecture by Dr Spyros Tsoutsoumpis:
21in21.co.uk 