When: Tuesday, March 11, 2025 – 6–8 p.m.
Reception to follow the program.
Location: Chevron Auditorium, International House
2299 Piedmont Ave, Berkeley, CA 94720
Professor Artemis Leontis is C.P. Cavafy Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature and Director of the Modern Greek Program at the University of Michigan. She is currently the Editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies and of the book series “Greek/Modern Intersections” published by the University of Michigan Press. She teaches and studies aspects of Hellenism in modernity, from Modern Greek language, literature, and culture to graffiti, Greek myth in film, and the encounters of living Greeks with people who, like Eva Sikelianos, visit Greece and imagine themselves among the ancients.
As the 2025 Nikos Kazantzakis Endowed Lecturer, Professor Leontis will address the topic of “Women Talking in a Closet of the Archive of Hellenism”
A large cache of hundreds of lesbian love letters of Eva Palmer Sikelianos (1874-1952)—director of two Delphic festivals and patron of many creators in Greece, including Nikos Kazantzakis—from the early 1900s lay hidden in the Center for Asia Minor Studies for decades before the collection was opened in 2022. What is its story, and what can we learn from reading it against its long, precarious existence in a dark backroom cabinet of the Greek state-financed institute dedicated to a subject of national historical importance? The collection combines the two-sided correspondence of Palmer with many women prior to her marriage to Angelos Sikelianos in 1907. The materials register the intensity of their romantic ties and efforts to reimagine kinship, belonging, and the flows of time back to the archaic Greek poet Sappho. This talk will follow the twists and turns of the collection’s creation and read the letters with attention to the gendered, emotional, and socially deviant desires they express. The dissonance of the letters within an institute dedicated to the study of Orthodox Christians of Asia Minor and their uprooting to Greece following the 20th century’s first compulsory population exchange provides a framework for asking questions about the breadth of the archive of 20th-century Hellenism and the resources it hides that push against powerful national narratives.