The second session of the 'Glimpses of the Past in the Cultural Expressions of Greece and Turkey' lecture series will take place on Wednesday, October the 19th.

Anna Stavrakopoulou will talk on "Karaghiozis Performances from the Cities to the Countryside" while Serdar Öztürk will give a speach on "The Affective Public Sphere: Karagöz Talks to Ottoman Coffeehouse Frequenters".

Anna Stavrakopoulou studied philology at the University of Crete and theatre at Université Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle (DEA, Institut d’Etudes Théâtrales) and at Harvard University (PhD, 1994). She taught at New York University, at the University of Bosporus in Istanbul (where she initiated courses on ancient and modern Greek, with the support of the Onassis Foundation) and at Harvard University (1996-1999). She served as Deputy Executive Director of the Onassis Foundation (USA) (1999-2001) and taught as a visiting professor at Yale and the University of Crete (2001-2002). She is an Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at the School of Drama (AUTH), where she has been teaching since 2003. Furthermore, she is a founding member and part of the faculty team of Harvard Summer Program in Greece (which has been in operation from 2002 to the present) and Associate Director of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies-Greece (based in Nafplio). She has received grants from the Greek State Scholarships Foundation, Ilex Foundation and Bogliasco Foundation. She has served as the Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors at the National Theatre of Northern Greece (2011-2013). She has co-edited, with Gregory Nagy, the volume Modern Greek Literature: Critical Essays (Routledge, New York 2003) and recently, she published an annotated translation, with an extensive introduction of Alexandrovodas the Unscrupulous (1785) by G. N. Soutsos (The Isis Press, Istanbul 2012), for which she received an Honorable Mention by the 2013 MGSA Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize committee. Her research interests revolve around comedy (popular and erudite), as well as theatrical translation.

Prof. Serdar Öztürk is a lecturer at the Department of Radio Television and Cinema in the Faculty of Communication in Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey. His uses an interdisciplinary perpective in his studies and has published extensive papers both in national and international journals, and seven books concerning the cultural history of Turkey as well as the history and sociology of cinema. His books include his doctoral dissertation, Coffeehouses and Power in the Turkish Republic (1930-1945) (Cumhuriyet Türkiyesinde Kahvehane ve İktidar 1930-1945) and his other major studies are: Cinema, Reception, and Politics during the Early Republican Period (Erken Cumhuriyet Döneminde Sinema Seyir Siyaset); Dialectics of Communication in the Ottoman Period (Osmanlıda İletişimin Diyalektiği); The Sources of Sociology of Communication in Turkey (Türkiye’de İletişim Sosyolojisinin Kaynakları); The Origins of Communication Thought in Turkey (Türkiye’de İletişimin Düşüncesinin Kökenleri). His last published book, Space and Power: The Subpolitics of Communication Places with Movies (Mekan ve İktidar: Filmlerle İletişim Mekanlarının Altpolitikası) has mainly focused on cinema sociology. Öztürk has recently focused and published on film-philosophy. He has also attempted to publish a film-philosophy journal titled SineFilozofi (CinePhilosophy; www.sinefilozofi.org). In this context his forthcoming book CinePhilosophy: The Journey into Kurosawa’s Dreams (SineFilozofi: Akira Kurosawa’nın Düşleri’nde Yolculuk) focuses on the relationship of film and philosophy.

To watch the lectures live, please click here.