“How to Think About the Past”

Lecture by
Katherine Elizabeth Fleming
President and CEO, J. Paul Getty Trust
and Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture and Civilization,
Department of History, New York University (NYU)

March 2, 2024
4:00 p.m.

UCLA Fowler Museum, Lenart Auditorium
Reception to follow

Event is free but advance registration is requested:
https://hellenic.ucla.edu/event/katherine-fleming-how-to-think-about-the-past/ 

In his poem “O gyrismos toy xenitemenou” (“The Return of the Exile”), George Seferis famously wrote that the protagonist’s nostalgia for Greece had created a “non-existent country.”

We access the past in various ways, none of them totally reliable: memory, nostalgia, history — carry with them different implications and different defects. This talk will consider various ways in which these different pathways to the past connect to modern Greek history, literature, and nationalism. Drawing on examples from contemporary oral history and from Greek-Jewish memoirs, it will consider the various ways in which the past is always with us — and always changing. 

Katherine Elizabeth Fleming is President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture and Civilization in the Department of History at New York University (NYU), where she served as Provost from 2016 to 2022. A historian of Modern Greece and the Mediterranean, her interests range from religious identity to historical memory to oral history. In Greece she is the co-director of the large-scale public history project ISTORIMA.ORG, which she co-founded with the journalist Sofia Papaioannou with a significant grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. From 2012-2016 she was President of the Board of the University of Piraeus in Greece. She currently serves as a political appointee to the administrative board of the University of Paris system in France. 

 This event is being co-sponsored by the UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture, LMU Basil P. Caloyeras Center for Modern Greek Studies and held under the auspices of the Consulate General of Greece in Los Angeles. This program is made possible thanks to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).