Professor Gonda van Steen on Adoption and Memory in Cold War Greece

The Hellenic Studies Initiative at the UIC Department of Classics and Mediterranean Studies and the Institute for the Humanities cordially invite you to a lecture on “(Greek) Adoptees Anonymous: Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece.”

Professor Gonda van Steen (University of Florida)
Drawing from her current book project, called Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece, Gonda van Steen discusses the placement of Greek children during the Cold War. Styled as a Greek-American adoption ethnography, the lecture dissects the biopolitics of the adoption movement from Greece to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s to argue that the large number of international adoptions of Greek children to Americans document a politics of dependence on the United States.

Gonda van Steen is the Cassas Professor of Greek Studies at the University of Florida. Her research interests include classical drama, Western travelers to Greece and the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth and twentieth-century receptions of the classics, and modern Greek intellectual history.  Her most recent book, Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967-1974 (OUP, 2015), analyzes theater life, performance, and censorship under the Greek junta.

Light refreshments will be on offer. The event is free and open to the public.