Bonna D. Wescoat, Director of the School
“Report on the Activity the School 2025”

Maria Georgopoulou, Director of the Gennadius Library
“Windows into a Collector’s Mind: The Scrapbooks of Joannes Gennadius”

The Gennadius library was founded in 1926 to house the 30,000-book collection of Greek diplomat Joannes Gennadius. In addition to books, Gennadius also collected photos and other ephemera (e.g. clippings from newspapers and books, engravings, pamphlets, broadsides, and invitations) that he assembled onto large scrapbooks. With the support of European Union funding, part of this complex material that focuses on history, topography, archaeology, costume, architecture, art, and journalism has been recently catalogued and digitized, and is freely available to all online. This talk will delve into the world of Joannes Gennadius to offer highlights of his life at the turn of the 20th century as well as document the history and international politics of the era.

Bonna D. Wescoat is the Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Art History at Emory University, and Director of American Excavations Samothrace. Her research interests center on architecture and sacred experience in ancient Greece, investigated through excavation, 3D digital modeling, architectural reconstruction, and experimental archaeology. While her current work addresses the excavation and publication of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Samothrace, she has also worked at Assos in Turkey. A former Marshall Scholar to Great Britain, Wescoat has been a Rome Prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Humanities Center. She has been Vice president of Research and Academic Affairs for the Archaeological Institute of America.

 

Dr. Maria Georgopoulou was educated at the University of Athens, Greece, the Sorbonne, and the University of California, Los Angeles, from where she received her Ph.D. in Art History in 1992. She taught art history at Yale University (1992-2004) where she also founded the Program for Hellenic Studies. She is currently Director of the Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She has edited numerous books and articles, and has curated several exhibitions. Her scholarly work explores the artistic and cultural interactions of the Mediterranean peoples in the Middle Ages within their economic and social context.

Her monograph, Venice's Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge University Press, 2001), examines the architecture and urbanism of Venetian Crete in the later Middle Ages. Professor Georgopoulou has been the recipient of a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, a Fulbright Grant, a Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, and has been a Junior Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.