Events

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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). For Bush House NE, please enter from 30 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4BG.

Picture: Gail Holst Warhaft’s new book, cover.

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. Interlocutor: Prof. Georgios Varouxakis (Queen Mary, University of London, author of The West: The History of an Idea (2025))

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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25 March 2026, Seminar 15:00-17:00, Bush House (SE) 2.10: Professor Emeritus Michael Silk will speak on the topic of ‘Poetic Language in Theory and Practice: Greek Archetypes and Modern Dilemmas’. By way of introduction, David Ricks will say a few words about the volume Poetry and Poetics, Greek and Beyond: Essays in Honour of M.S. Silk (2026), co-edited with Fiona Macintosh: https://www.routledge.com/Poetry-and-Poetics-Greek-and-Beyond-Essays-in-Honour-of-MS-Silk/Macintosh-Ricks/p/book/9781032585086.

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21 April 2026, Athens, Spiti tis Kyprou, 18:00-20:00: The Eighth Niki Marangou Memorial Lecture will be given by Manolis Savvidis on ‘Ο ορισμός της ποίησης’, in Greek.

Abstract: Μια διαχρονική προσέγγιση του ορισμού της ποίησης, και μια προσπάθεια του ορισμού της ελληνικής ποίησης με τους όρους και τα δεδομένα του 21ου αιώνα, πέρα από τα στερεότυπα, με παραδείγματα και αναφορές σε όλα τα είδη του λόγου αλλά και ειδικότερα στην προσωπικότητα και το έργο της Νίκης Μαραγκού.

Bio: Ο Μανόλης Σαββίδης γεννήθηκε στην Αθήνα το 1959. Σπούδασε φιλολογία στις ΗΠΑ (Harvard 1982) και εργάστηκε ως φιλόλογος, δημοσιογράφος και εκδότης σε έντυπα και ηλεκτρονικά μέσα. Ίδρυσε τις εκδόσεις «Ιστός» (1989) και την πολιτισμική εταιρεία «Σπουδαστήριο Νέου Ελληνισμού» (1996), και διαχειρίστηκε το Αρχείο Καβάφη (1996-2012). Διηύθυνε την εκδοτική εταιρεία «Ερμής» (1995-2005) και το κοινωφελές Ίδρυμα Λαμπράκη (2010-2016). Από το 2012 είναι πρόεδρος του ΔΣ του Ιδρύματος Λαμπράκη.

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Until 28 June 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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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/)

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.

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:

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