Upcoming Columbia Event: Screening of Yorgos Zois' Arcadia (9/30)

[Dimitris Antoniou]

Dear list members,  

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI) and the University Seminar in Modern Greek at Columbia University are organizing a screening of Yorgos Zois' award-winning film Arcadia (2024) followed by a discussion with the director on Tuesday, September 30 at Columbia (Dodge Hall) at 18:15. You can register for the event here. See below for details and the fall event schedule. We look forward to seeing you!   

With all good wishes,   
Dimitris  

Dimitris Antoniou

Lecturer in Hellenic Studies, Department of Classics

Associate Director, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative

Columbia University

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Screening of Yorgos Zois’ Arcadia (2024) and Discussion with the Director
Dodge Hall 511 (2960 Broadway)
September, 30, 2025
18:15 - 20:30 EST

SNFPHI and the University Seminar in Modern Greek welcome film director Yorgos Zois, who will be screening his latest film Arcadia (2024). Described as a “peculiar rumination on the hereafter” and “an unnerving and curious meditation on grief” (Variety), the film tells the story of a couple facing the grim task of recognizing the body of a loved one and trying to unearth the circumstances of her death—an endeavor that leads to encounters with the supernatural at an off-season beach bar in Marathon.

*Screening co-sponsored by the Film and Media Studies Program, School of the Arts

Screening of Rap Divas (Documentary-in-progress directed by Jazrad Khaleed and Silvia Tsobanaki) and Discussion with Khaleed
Hamilton 608 and online
October 28, 2025
16:00 - 17:30 EST

Jazra Khaleed will present excerpts from Rap Divas, a documentary in progress that he is co-directing with Silvia Tsobanaki. Rap Divas follows five rappers as they try to organize a concert at the Women’s Prison in Thiva. The documentary explores gender dynamics in Greek rap and the challenges that working-class women face in contemporary Greek society, while also shedding light on the intersections between the rap scene and poetic production. The screening will be followed by a poetry reading by Khaleed and a discussion.

*The footage that will be screened will be in Greek without subtitles

The Stains Queers Leave Behind: Dance-Theater, Poetry, and Archival Reimaginings 

Online
November,18, 2025
14:10 - 15:30 EST

In this seminar Billie Mitsikakos (DPhil, University of Oxford) brings into dialogue the dance-theater of Dimitris Papaioannou and the poetry of C.P. Cavafy to consider the traces queer bodies leave behind through movement and contact: imprints of limbs and blotched cloths that are neither disposed of nor archived in the conventional sense but nonetheless kept close in counterintuitive ways. Drawing on semiotic theory Mitsikakos asks what alternative insights into knowing and registering queer being the insistence on such remains offers and argues that such queer indexical stains disrupt dominant archival norms and radically reimagine the archive as non-authoritative, participatory, and inclusive.

Selling Sex in Interwar Salonica: Prostitution, Mobility, and Urban Space
Faculty House and Online
December 02, 2025
16:00 - 17:30 EST

History PhD candidate Dimitris Mitsopoulos (Columbia University) will explore the history of sex work in interwar Salonica, situating it within the city’s transformation from a multiethnic imperial port into a nationalized urban center in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire. Drawing on police records, League of Nations reports, and press, his seminar will consider how prostitution was shaped by overlapping processes of refugee resettlement, wartime militarization, state management of venereal disease, and the restructuring of the urban space.