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4 June 2026: Afternoon symposium: ‘Sissinghurst and Greece’: In Conversation
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/) on ‘Being in two places at once’
Registration for in-person or online attendance via Zoom: pursue the links via the AHL website, anglohellenicleague.org/events
Abstract: From stories conjured out of thin air – the genesis of the Greek novel about diaspora Dendrites, set in crisis-ridden 1980s Camden, New Jersey, among a community of immigrants trying and failing to realize the American dream. A reflection on endings and beginnings in life, books, and films, and on their hidden symmetry. A journey from the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat to the mischievous art of writing, to the formation of an ever-shifting identity and the heartrending need for belonging. And, at last, making the impossible possible: being in two places at once – the inner conflict that fuels creativity.
About the speaker: Kallia Papadaki is a writer. Her novel Dendrites, published by Polis Editions, was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2017. Her short story collection, The Back Lot Sound, received the Debut Author Award from Diavazo magazine in 2010. Her screenplay for Penny Panayotopoulou’s film September won the Balkan Fund Development Award in 2010 and received a Nipkow Programme fellowship in Berlin in 2011. The film premiered in the Official Competition section of the 48th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Her screenplay for the film Wishbone, also directed by Panayotopoulou, was nominated for the IRIS Screenplay Award by the Hellenic Film Academy. The film premiered in the World Competition of the 36th Galway Film Fleadh and won the Audience Award at the 65th Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Papadaki’s play Roots of Cotton, directed by Efi Theodorou, was staged at Little Epidaurus in July 2022 and published by Melani Editions. Papadaki teaches screenwriting at the Stavrakos Film School and serves as a script consultant for the Pop Up Film Residency, the Mediterranean Film Institute, and ERT’s Microfilm program.
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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 and Philosophy 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: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/katie-lentakis-memorial-fund-award-ceremony-tickets-1987119576144?aff=oddtdtcreator&keep_tld=true
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), 18:00-20.00: Lecture by Dr Spyros Tsoutsoumpis: ‘A Violent Middle Class: Paramilitaries, Gangs, and State Formation in Modern Greece, 1912-1949‘
Abstract: This presentation rethinks the relationship between violence, nation-building, and ethnicity in the northern borderlands of Greece between 1903 and 1949 through a reconstruction of events in Thesprotia from the Balkan Wars to the onset of the Cold War. The transformation of these regions from imperial borderlands into ‘ethnic’ homelands has typically been examined through the lens of the state. This presentation challenges that approach by focusing instead on the role of rural populations, minorities, and non-state armed actors, including paramilitaries, smugglers, guerrillas, and warlords, who have largely been written out of this history. The presentation problematizes conventional interpretations in two ways. First, it demonstrates that the inhabitants of the borderlands were active agents in these processes and played a central role in how the idea of the nation-state was established, disseminated, and negotiated within their communities. Secondly, it argues that experiences of mobilization and ethnic violence in the periphery had a decisive impact on the institutions, practices, and imaginaries of nation-building itself. In this respect, the periphery rather than the centre shaped both the timing and character of national and institutional formation. These findings challenge conventional understandings of the centre–periphery relationship and shed new light on the making of the nation-state in Greece and Southeastern Europe.
Speaker’s bio: Dr Spyridon Tsoutsoumpis is a historian of Modern Greece and Southeastern Europe and an associate lecturer at the Department of Politics in Manchester. His research focuses on the intersection of political violence, nation-building, and organized crime during the era of the European Civil War (1905-1949). Tsoutsoumpis has issued numerous publications, including A History of the Greek Resistance in the Second World War: The Peoples Armies (Manchester University Press, 2016) and Paramilitary Violence in the Post-Ottoman Borderlands: Pro-state Militias and Nation-Building, 1905-1949 (Bloomsbury 2006). Tsoutsoumpis holds a PhD in History from Manchester University and is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships from Princeton University, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Portico Foundation, New Europe College (Bucharest), and the Centre for Advanced Studies (Sofia). He has held lectureships at Lancaster University, Manchester Metropolitan University, Hradec Kralove University and Friedrich Schiller University in Jena.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1990799716543?aff=oddtdtcreator
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