Explosion of Fellows at the Gennadius Library
In 2007-2008 the Gennadius Library saw an explosion in the number of fellows who used its facilities.
The 2007-8 Frantz Fellow was Cristina Stancioiu (Ph.D. candidate, UCLA) working on “The cross-cultural relationships and artistic interchange between Byzantium and Europe during the 13th to 16th century.”
The 2007-8 Cotsen Traveling Fellow, Stefan Papaioannou (Ph.D. candidate, University of Maryland) conducted research in the Archives of Stefanos Dragoumis for his dissertation titled “Balkan Wars between the lines: A social history, 1912-1919.”
Two East European fellows spent most of their time working with Gennadeion collections: Yura Konstantinova worked on the Stephanos Dragoumis papers and Petru Bodgan-Maleon made regular use of the Byzantine collection.
Two of the American School NEH fellows for 2007-8 were Byzantinists: Timothy Gregory of Ohio State University and Alicia Simpson of Koç University.
In the Fall of 2007 Fulbright Fellow Professor Gonda Van Steen of the University of Arizona conducted research on “Theater rites and rights in Greece: The performance of free citizenship.”
Three Coulson/Cross Fellows Elif Bayraktar of Bilkent University (working on “The Role of the Greek Patriarchate vis-à-vis the Ottoman empire in the 17th and 18th centuries”), Foti Benlisoy of Bosphorus University (working on the “Asia Minor Disaster and the federation of the Old Warriors Association”), and Merih Erol of Bosphorus University (working on “Cultural Identifications of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. Discourse on Music in the Nineteenth and early twentieth Centuries”) also used the Gennadius Library as their home base for their research.
Furthermore, two associate members of the School, Ph.D. candidates Nanako Sawayanagi of NYU and Ivan Drpic of Harvard University, were recipients of the prestigious Onassis (Modern Greek historian Nanako Sawayanagi of NYU) and CASVA (Byzantine art historian Ivan Drpic of Harvard University) fellowships respectively.
Finally, archaeologist Silvana Di Paolo of the National Council of Research of Italy conducted research on the “Historical and Archaeological Atlas of the Damascus Region and Southern Syria in the pre-Classical Period.”