Dukakis Center hosts Professor Alex Papadopoulos at Ypsilon
The Dukakis Center hosted its season finale for the 2022-23 academic year at Ypsilon on May 24, 2023, with a lecture featuring Alex Papadopoulos and Triantafyllos Petridis. A lively audience of Anatolia College alums, ACT students, alums, and staff, students from AUTh, and friends of the Dukakis Center were on the edge of their seats for close to two hours of discussion and debate on Hellenism and Hellenisms in Modern Greece.
Papadopoulos, Professor of Urban and Political Geography, DePaul University, Chicago (and Anatolia College Class of 1980), and Petridis, Director at the 3rd Secondary School in Athens, alternated in English and Greek with material from their jointly published book Hellenic Statecraft and the Geopolitics of Difference (Routledge, 2022). The case studies, which were presented, included the geopolitical context of policy-making in the Modern Greek nation-state, the status of the Pomak community in Northern Greece, and the construction of a new mosque in Athens.
At the heart of the discussion was how Hellenism has been defined and redefined since 1830 and how to think about competing definitions of what it means to be a Hellene today. Papadopoulos and Petridis sought to unravel the story of state-building, urbanization, and national identity, with a critical role in the North, in Thessaloniki, Macedonia, and Thrace. Papadopoulos and Petridis have been collaborating on similar projects since the mid-1990s. Petridis has written extensively on these same questions in his work on the critical teaching of history and inter-communal reconciliation based on new pedagogies and curricula.
Professor Papadopoulos appeared with the support of the Anatolia College Alumni Association (ΣΑΑΚ) and the Fulbright Foundation Greece. He is currently a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Ionian University, teaching and conducting collaborative research on Anthropocene threats to tangible and intangible cultural heritage(s).
Professor Alex Papadopoulos
Triantafyllos Petridis
The Dukakis Center is an independent, non-profit unit of ACT - the American College of Thessaloniki. The mission of the Dukakis Center is to inspire youth from both sides of the Atlantic to take an active interest and role in public affairs. Named after three-term Governor of Massachusetts Michael S. Dukakis, the Center has hosted hundreds of public events dedicated to sharing Governor Dukakis’ public service ethos with a new generation of citizens. In 2023-24 the Dukakis Center will celebrate its 25 seasons of public service initiatives in Thessaloniki.
