The Delphi Academy of European Studies focuses on the diachronic and synchronic study of European history and culture and the ways in which Europe today responds to the multifaceted challenges of political, economic, and cultural globalization; it was initiated in 2017 as a program of the European Cultural Delphi Centre, sponsored by the Region of Central Greece.

The Academy offers two-week interdisciplinary, tuition-free seminars at the Centre’s facilities in Delphi. The seminars, which are taught in English by world renowned scholars, are open mainly to graduate students/PhD candidates but also to qualified undergraduates. The instructors adopt interdisciplinary approaches to their subjects, with a view to addressing the research interests of students in the Humanities as well as the Social Sciences. The seminars are accompanied by a workshop and/or invited lectures on current political and cultural developments in Europe.

The overarching topic of the Academy’s seminar program 2025 is Humanity in Transition. The seminars will be offered in June 15-28, 2025.

The curriculum and academic function of the Delphi Academy of European Studies is overseen by an International Committee consisting of the following Professors: Homi Bhabha (Harvard; former Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center), Peter Frankopan (Oxford; Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research), Michèle Lamont (Harvard; former Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs), Spiros Pollalis (Harvard School of Design), Panagiotis Roilos (Harvard; founder of the Academy and chair of the Committee, President of the European Cultural Delphi Centre) and Dimitrios Yatromanolakis (Johns Hopkins University).

Program

Citizens of the Earth? Cosmopolitanism in a Planetary Age

by Patrice Maniglier

Seminar description:

Cosmopolitanism is the recurrent idea that political subjectivity cannot be contained within already instituted local political communities: there are political rights and duties that cut across borders. Widely discussed in the times of triumphant neoliberal globalization, it lost its grip on the imaginaries along with the social disenchantment with globalization and the rising awareness of its ecological limits.

In contrast, the seminar will investigate the idea that the present moment calls for the reformulation of the cosmopolitan idea, with the rising awareness of our ‘planetary condition’, i.e. of the fact that local forms of life can impact the entire planetary system on spatial and temporal scales that go far beyond the experiential scope of the responsible agent.

Introducing notions of antique (Stoic), modern (Kantian), and postmodern cosmopolitanisms (Bhabha, Gilroy, Braidotti, Appadurai, Beck), and confronting them with interpretations of the present times as of the ‘planetary’ (Chakrabarty), or “Gaia” (Latour, Stengers), the seminar will explore the concepts of “planetary agency”, “terrestrial cities”, “geocosmopolitics”, that cut across the borders of species and scales.  

Patrice Maniglier is Maître de Conférences at the Philosophy Department of the University of Paris Nanterre. He is the director of the research unit HARp (Histoire des Arts et des Représentations – philosophie) and one of the founding editors of the online journal Les Temps qui restent (launched after the end of Les Temps Modernes):  https://lestempsquirestent.org/fr.

About the End of the World: Crises of Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Culture and Theory

by Mariano Siskind

Seminar description:

Cosmopolitanism has been a vital master concept to understanding modern and modernist processes of global displacement and disjuncture, as well as liminal and transnational formations and subjectivities. Today, the displacement of more than 122 million refugees and migrants as a result of environmental catastrophes, economic hardships, and small and large-scale perpetual wars and terror points to the radical dislocation of the symbolic structure we used to call “world.” Is the concept of cosmopolitanism still useful in interrogating today’s generalized sense of global crisis—particularly the migration crisis and its traumatic losses? What is the ethico-political potential today of a cosmopolitanism without a world? This seminar is not about the very real historical suffering and losses of those whose bodies are wounded by the political, economic, military, and environmental upheavals that we will call ‘the end of the world;’ it is rather about the post-cosmopolitan traces of those experiences in art, literature, film, and theory, and about how we can determine what art and the critical humanities can and can no longer do about the end of the world.

Mariano Siskind is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Desires. Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (2014), Rumo a um cosmopolitismo da perda. Ensaio sobre o fim do mundo (2020) and The Modernist Songbook. Standards y variaciones sobre formas muertas (2021).

The seminar program is tuition-free.

Upon completion, certificates will be awarded to the students. Students will be offered free lodging and meals by the Academy at the European Cultural Delphi Centre. Applications are to be submitted by March 17, 2025. For more information on the application process and the documents required see here.

European Cultural Delphi Centre

The European Cultural Delphi Centre (ECDC) -an initiative of Konstantinos Karamanlis- was established in 1977 with a view to creating a global intellectual and cultural hub in Delphi that would foster and promote intercultural dialogue in Europe and beyond. Operating under the supervision of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and the auspices of the Council of Europe, the Centre has become a distinguished international venue for art, cultural production and creative intellectual and scholarly exchange.

Throughout its long history, the ECDC has established numerous cultural initiatives of international caliber, including the Delphi Academy of European Studies, the International Meetings on Ancient Drama, a Fine Arts Program and Seminars in Ancient Greek Language.

Read also via Greek News Agenda: Rethinking Greece | Panagiotis Roilos: “Language constitutes a powerful bastion against hegemonizing tendencies”; Rethinking Greece | Peter Frankopan: “We are living in an age of imperial revivals”; Delphi: the navel of the ancient world