The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies is pleased to present professor Gonda Van Steen, Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature and director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King's College London, for its Spring Seminar Series event on Friday, April 9 at 1:00 PM PT.

Join us for her talk entitled "Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece."

This event is free and open to the public. Due to the nature of the presentation, this event will not be recorded.

Guests can register for the event through Eventbrite, alternatively, they can send an email to hscomm@sfu.ca.

Abstract

Professor Gonda Van Steen's research will offer a first introduction to a Greek American adoption ethnography, set against the backdrop of the global Cold War. It is the first project to study the biopolitics of the adoption movement from Greece to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. The vehicle of the mass international adoptions of Greek-born children symbolically (and no less physically) marked the transition to a new political and ideological status quo that sought to balance the democratic West against the communist East--but at what cost? This overseas adoption movement places a fitting lens on American as well as Greek foreign policies, security concerns, refugee provisions, and other external affairs, which were integral parts of the Cold War project. The mass adopting-out of Greek children to America proves to be the most concrete example of the politics of dependence on the United States. The Greek adoptees’ (shaken) identities have infused the lived experiences of their descendants, and they co-exist, in multiple ways, with American and European transnational identities; they also prove that the personal and the political stories of postwar global history intersect.

Speaker bio

Professor Gonda Van Steen is the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature and director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King's College London. Formerly, as the Cassas Chair in Greek Studies at the University of Florida, she taught courses in ancient and modern Greek language and literature and served as president and subsequently as executive director of the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA, www.mgsa.org).

Her research and teaching interests include Greek language and literature through Byzantine and Modern Greek, Western travellers to Greece and the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth and twentieth-century receptions of the classics and especially of ancient theatre, and modern Greek intellectual and social history.

Van Steen is the author of five books: Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece (2000); Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire (2010); Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands (2011); and Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967-1974 (2015).

Her latest book, entitled Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? (2019), has taken her into the new, uncharted terrain of Greek adoption stories that become paradigmatic of Cold War politics and history.