Second of two panel discussions chaired by Roderick Beaton, Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, King’s College London, co-organised with the British School at Athens.

Ideas about making a revolution – ideas that are in themselves revolutionary: these two back-to-back panel discussions, one in Athens, the other in London, will revolve around both concepts, as ways of understanding the outbreak of revolution by Orthodox Christian, Greek-speaking subjects of the Ottoman empire in the spring of 1821, that would lead to the creation of Greece as a modern nation-state in 1830.

Speakers will focus on the transmission, or ‘migration’, of such ideas across the European continent in the wake of 1789 Revolution in France and their impact in creating the climate in which a Greek revolution became possible in 1821.

• Georgios Varouxakis: 'The Idea of Greece: 1820s and Aftermath’
• Athena Leoussi: ‘Two Revolutionary Ideals: Hellenism and Nationalism’
• Sanja Perovic: ‘The French Revolution Effect: Translating the Idiom of Revolution’

This is the second in a two-part series and is co-hosted with the Hellenic Society. For more information, please go to https://21in21.co.uk/events/.

To attend the online event, please register beforehand. 

Speaker Bio

Georgios Varouxakis is Professor in History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London and Co-director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought. He has been research fellow at UCL, Princeton University, and Senior Research Fellow at Lichtenberg-Kolleg, University of Göttingen. His research interests include history of political thought and transcultural intellectual history (C.18th-20th), with emphasis on political thought on nationalism, patriotism and cosmopolitanism, political thought on international relations, empire and imperialism, and the intellectual history of ideas of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’. His books include Liberty Abroad: J.S. Mill on International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Mill on Nationality (Routledge, 2002), Victorian Political Thought on France and the French (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), Contemporary France: An Introduction to French Politics and Society (Arnold, 2003, co-authored). He is currently writing a major study on The West: The History of an Idea for Princeton University Press.

Athena Leoussi is Associate Professor in European History in the Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Reading, UK. She is a Founder of The Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, and a Founder Editor and continuing Editor of the journal, Nations and Nationalism. She has published extensively on the role of the visual arts in nation-building and the influence of classical Greek notions of beauty and citizenship in re-defining modern European national identities. She was one of the organisers of the British Museum’s exhibition, ‘Defining Beauty’ (2015). Her publications include Nationalism and Classicism (1998), The Encyclopaedia of Nationalism (Transaction, 2001), Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism (edited with Steven Grosby for Edinburgh University Press, 2006), and Famous Battles and How They Shaped the Modern World (2 vols. edited with Beatrice Heuser for Pen & Sword, 2018).

Sanja Perovic is Reader in Eighteenth-Century French Studies at King’s College London. Publications include The Calendar in Revolutionary France: The Perception of Time in Literature, Culture and Politics (2012) and, as co-editor, a special issue on The French Revolution Effect (Comparative Critical Studies 2018). She is currently PI of the AHRC grant ‘Radical Translations: The Transfer of Revolutionary Culture between Britain, France and Italy (1789-1815).