NEW YORK – This April marks the 80th anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Greece by German troops during World War II. To reflect on the occasion The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI) at Columbia University has invited historian Menelaos Charalambidis to join in a discussion of the memory of WWII, public history, and walking tours as a public humanities method. Walking through History: Tracing Resistance and the Great Famine in Athens is co-organized with the University Seminar in Modern Greek and takes place Thursday, April 15, 12-1:30 PM ET, via Zoom.

The first winter of the German and Italian occupation of Greece (1941-1942) saw a famine that cost the lives of at least 45,000 people in Athens and Piraeus. Although the word “hunger” is etched on Greek collective memory of the Second World War, there are no commemorative traces in the urban landscape marking this traumatic experience. The particular circumstances that led to the famine and its connection to the growth of the resistance movement are also not widely known. How might we cultivate public awareness of the realities of this troubling period in Greek history? In this seminar, historian Menelaos Charalambidis draws on his experience leading walking tours in Athens since 2013 to consider effective ways to communicate expert knowledge on the famine, urban resistance, and collaboration with the occupiers to a lay audience.

The seminar will be conducted in Greek.

More information is available online: https://snfphi.columbia.edu/events/

Seminar link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/99172292221

SNFPHI also announced that the sci-fi ethnography zine is now available following the experiment in speculative ethnography that brought together over fifty anthropologists, architects, artists, graphic designers, filmmakers, photographers, writers, and zine makers in November and December 2020. The collaborative zine, produced as part of the "Extra-terrestrial Ethnographies of the Future-Present" workshop, is available online: shorturl.at/ctzFX.

Make sure to click on the video and audio icons to watch and listen to the videos and audio files that workshop participants created.