Ion Dragoumis: 100 Years after His Assassination
Presented By
American School of Classical Studies at Athens
Speaker(s)
Roderick Beaton
Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek & Byzantine History, Language & Literature at King’s College London
Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan
Doreen C. Spitzer Archivist at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens
Jenifer Neils
Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens
Location
WebinarThe video of our webinar is now available in our video archive.
About the Webinar:
A diplomat, writer, philosopher, visionary, and revolutionary, Ion Dragoumis (1878–1920) is now a legendary figure in the Greek imagination because of his untimely death. On July 31, 1920, Dragoumis was killed in cold blood by political adversaries and drew his last breath on Kifisias Avenue, not far from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
To commemorate the centenary of Dragoumis' assassination, the American School's Archives has organized a major exhibition, "Ion Dragoumis: Between East and West. One Hundred Years After His Assassination," scheduled to open on October 15, 2020. For the first time, rare documents and photos from Dragoumis' personal papers will be showcased to the public. This rich family archive was donated to the American School in 1959 by Dragoumis' brother Philippos.
Join us for a virtual preview of the exhibition, followed by a lecture featuring Roderick Beaton, Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek & Byzantine History, Language & Literature at King's College London. Professor Beaton will discuss Dragoumis' identity politics in conjunction with Eleftherios Venizelos' Great Idea (Μεγάλη Ιδέα).
About the Speakers:
Roderick Beaton is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek & Byzantine History, Language & Literature at King’s College London, where he taught from 1988 until 2018. Beaton is the author of many books and articles about aspects of the Greek-speaking world from the twelfth century to the present day, including George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel. A Biography (2003); Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (2013), and Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation (2019, now a Penguin paperback). He is completing an overview of Greek history from the Bronze Age to the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution in 2021, to be published in 2021 with the title The Greeks: A Global History. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA, 2013), a Fellow of King’s College (FKC, 2018), and Commander of the Order of Honor of the Hellenic Republic, an award conferred on him by President Prokopios Pavlopoulos in September 2019.
Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan is the Doreen C. Spitzer Archivist of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Natalia studied archaeology at the University of Thessaloniki and Bryn Mawr College (Ph.D. 1993). In the past decade, she has also gained a reputation as an institutional historian writing about the history of American archaeology in Greece. To the lay audience, she is known through her blog, From the Archivist’s Notebook, which has featured more than 100 essays since she created it in 2013.
Jenifer Neils is the Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens—the first woman to hold that position in the School’s history. Before that, she was the Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts and the Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University. Neils has held a number of distinguished fellowships and has been a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University.