II&I - Snfphi

09/29/2026

Please join us on Tuesday, October 13th for the second University Seminar in Modern Greek of the academic year.

Professor Karen Van Dyck (Columbia University) will open her undergraduate course, "Retranslation: Worlding Cavafy," to a wider audience as she welcomes acclaimed Cavafy biographer professor Gregory Jusdanis (Ohio State University).

🔹Reading Hidden Things: Poetry, Biography, Retranslation🔹

The seminar is co-sponsored by the Program in Hellenic Studies Columbia University.

📆Date: Tuesday, October 13th
🕕Time: 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM EST
📍Location: Faculty House & Online
⬇️Visit our website to register and to read about entry rules:

In this seminar, Karen Van Dyck opens her undergraduate course, Retranslation: Worlding Cavafy, to a wider audience and welcomes acclaimed Cavafy biographer professor Gregory Jusdanis. In conversation with students, they will engage in a close reading of Cavafy’s “Hidden Things” and use Jusdan...

09/10/2026

To mark the 40th anniversary of the devastating Kalamata earthquake, SNFPHI awardees Vicky Kouskouna, Angeliki Barberopoulou, and Panagiotis Andrianopoulos, in collaboration with the Αρχείων Τάξις / Arxeion Taxis organization, present the results of the public humanities project Enceladoc. At the event, visitors will have the opportunity to explore seismological data, oral testimonies, press reports, government circulars, and urban planning documents that constitute the records of a digital archive currently being developed on the Kalamata earthquake.

🔗 For more information on the project: https://snfphi.columbia.edu/projects/enceladoc/

09/08/2026

Please join us on Tuesday, September 22nd for the first University Seminar in Modern Greek of the academic year.

SNFPHI awardees Vicky Kouskouna (University of Athens), Aggeliki Barberopoulou (Hellenic Center for Marine Research), and Panagiotis Andrianopoulos (Archeion Taxis) behind the project EncelaDoc will present:

🔹Fault Lines & Front Lines: Disaster, Foreign Aid, and the Greek Civil War in Messinia🔹

The seminar is co-sponsored by the Program in Hellenic Studies Columbia University and supported by Columbia Global Center | Athens.

📆Date: Tuesday, September 22nd
🕕Time: 4:00 - 5:30 PM EST
📍Location: Mathematics 520 & Online
⬇️Visit our website to register and to read about entry rules:

In October 1947, Messinia was struck by an earthquake. At the time Greece was in the midst of a brutal civil war and the region was rapidly becoming a critical front in the global Cold War. This workshop will explore the 1947 earthquake not just as a geological event, but as a human and political cr...

08/05/2026

Every year, SNFPHI, in collaboration with UGE and the Athens Global Center, offers the Athens Curatorial Project, a three-week undergraduate program centered around the Global Core seminar Hellenism and the Topographical Imagination and a collaborative curatorial project. The Athens Curatorial Project serves as our annual laboratory for experimenting with new pedagogical approaches inspired by the practices and methods of the public humanities as well as by our collaborations with fellows from the II&I and SNFPHI awardees.

Subscribe to the SNFPHI newsletter to learn more about this summer's project highlights:

✡️A day trip to Chalkida's Jewish cemetery and synagogue, guided by 92-year-old Mair Maisis, former president of the Jewish Community of Chalkida

🎥A screening of "To a Land Unknown" and a discussion with the film's director and II&I fellow, Mahdi Fleifel

📖 The acquisition of books, exhibition catalogs, and zines to enrich the shared Columbia–Princeton library collections

🏺A student-curated online exhibition featuring objects from the collection of Themis Ragias, a collector of fine art, crafts, and curiosities

🔗Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://snfphi.columbia.edu/

06/26/2026

🎙️ Poetry Day ✨

On May 21, the Institute welcomed poets, artists, and audiences for a day dedicated to poetry in all its forms, through workshops, readings, collective creation, live performance, and a nocturnal walk through the streets of Paris. 📚

🗣️Current and former Institute Fellows Jason Allen-Paisant, Alice Oswald, Jay Bernard, Will Harris, and Lynn Xu were joined by Algerian poet Habib Tengour, creating a vibrant program that explored poetry as a space for reflection, encounter, and shared imagination.

The day began with Jason Allen-Paisant’s workshop inspired by Gennadij Ajgi’s vision of the poem as body, temple, and liturgy, inviting participants to rethink poetic form through space, ritual, and creative practice. Throughout the afternoon, the collective Loose Associations created zines live with contributions from participants, while visitors could also collect a poem-stamp from Jay Bernard’s ongoing project, The If Print.

The evening featured poetry readings by Jay Bernard, Will Harris, Lynn Xu, Jason Allen-Paisant, Alice Oswald, and Habib Tengour, alongside a collective performance by La Chaise, whose voices and music traced new poetic landscapes inspired by the Global South.

The celebration concluded with Last Post, a nighttime walk led by Alice Oswald to the historic mailbox on rue du Louvre, where participants wrote and posted poems to one another, bringing the day’s conversations into the city itself.

Thank you all for coming and sharing

Thanks to for this video.

06/16/2026

On Wednesday, June 17th the new issue of Archeiotaxio, the journal published by Αρχεία Σύγχρονης Κοινωνικής Ιστορίας - Contemporary Social History Archives, will feature a special section on Albanian migration in Greece and its historical and social dimensions. The special section was edited by Manos Avgeridis and SNPFHI awardee Ilirida Musaraj.

The issue highlights the systematic and ongoing work involved in developing the Archive of Albanian Migration, an initiative of ASKI curated and coordinated by Ilirida Musaraj and supported by the SNFPHI.

The presentation of the issue will include special talks and a screening of the documentary ALBGREKO, directed by Ilir Tsouko and produced by Onassis Culture.

📅Wednesday, 17 June 2026 at 18:30
📍Athens Book Space, Eleftherias Park (Vasilissis Sofias Avenue, near the "Megaro Mousikis" metro station)

🔗To learn more about the SNFPHI project: https://snfphi.columbia.edu/projects/voicing-the-albanian-experience-in-greece/
🔗To learn more about ASKI: https://askiweb.eu/en/event/presentation-of-the-new-issue-of-archeiotaxio-journal/

06/02/2026

✨NEW LIBRARY CHAT EPISODE 📚
🔗 Full video available in the link in our bio

✍🏻Novelist, short story writer, and Fellow Carys Davies and Aubrey Gabel, Fellow at the Institute and specialist in French and Francophone literature and visual culture, came together for a Library Chat reflecting on their time at the Institute, where neighbouring offices sparked conversations on books, knitting, and shared interests. In discussion, they explored Davies’s new historical novel, set between 1870s Connecticut and the Antarctic, and Gabel’s research on comics journalism, considering how fiction, visual storytelling, and research can offer new ways of engaging with history, place, and human experience. ✨

05/27/2026

✨NEW LIBRARY CHAT EPISODE 📚
🔗 Full video available in the link in our bio

Composer and Fellow Finola Merivale , whose music has been described as both “a wild ride” and “edgy and discomforting yet exciting and distinctive,” and saxophonist, 🎷improviser, and composer Catherine Sikora came together for a Library Chat ahead of Merivale’s portrait concert celebrating the launch of “Abhaile” , the Irish word for “home” , their collaborative album for saxophone and electronics. In conversation, they reflected on the origins of their artistic partnership, the development of each piece on the album, and the collaborative process behind shaping its sonic world.

🗣️Moving between composition, improvisation, memory, and place, the discussion offered insight into how their shared creative language evolved over years of working together, and how sound became a way of exploring intimacy, displacement, and belonging.

Special thanks to Finola and Catherine for this gift.

05/22/2026

💫Each year, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, together with the SNF Public Humanities Initiative and The Benaki Museum , gathers in Kardamyli at the home of Patrick Leigh Fermor in the Peloponnese. 🌱

Fellows of the Institute, PHI awardees, and invited guests come together to collaborate, exchange ideas, and reflect on a shared theme. Our fourth annual Kardamyli workshop took place in May 2026 and explored the theme: “The Book.” 📚

This year, the creative duo behind “These Are A Few Of Our Favorite Things,” curators of the Athens Zine Bibliotheque — an Athens-based library of zines and small editions from around the world — joined the workshop.

A heartfelt thank you to all our guests, and of course to the Benaki Museum for being our partners in this beautiful yearly adventure. See you next year!

04/30/2026

🎙️On February 19, 2026, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination had the pleasure of welcoming acclaimed soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan .barbara to Reid Hall to deliver the fourth annual Sidney N. Zubrow Memorial Lecture. In the Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, Hannigan presented Resonance, Flow and Surrender in the Creative Process, offering an in-depth reflection on artistic collaboration and the creative journey behind new music for the operatic and concert stage.

Her presentation was followed by a discussion with Nicholas Spice, fiction writer, critic, and consulting publisher to the London Review of Books.

The Institute is deeply grateful to Edward, Betsy, and Daniel Cohen for making this lecture possible.