Stavros Kallergis was a leading figure of 19th-century Greek socialism; editor of the newspaper Socialistis [The Socialist] and organizer of the first May Day celebration in Athens, in 1893.Dr Kostis Karpozilos, a historian and the director of the Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI), will present a lecture at the Greek Centre, on Wednesday 25 September, as a part of a special series of the Greek History and Culture Seminars.

Stavros Kallergis fascinating life spans from his imprisonment in Athens and his flight to Paris to his participation in the Cretan War of Independence and his withdrawal from politics after the island’s incorporation in the Greek state. This trajectory highlights the transnational connections and threads that linked the social situation of Greece of the 19th century with the emerging “social question” in the countries of developed capitalism. From this point of view, Stavros Kallergis allows us to understand the way in which socialist imagination was shaped in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century: how did socialists, those who argued that they held the interpretative keys of historical evolution, imagine the future?

Kostis Karpozilos (Yiannina 1978) is a historian and the director of the Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI). He has earned a degree in Modern Greek Literature at the University of Thessaloniki (2002), completed an M.A. in Historical Research at the University of Sheffield (2003) and a Ph.D. in History at the University of Crete (2010). His thesis focused on revolutionary diasporas in the United States and the trajectory of Greek-American radicalism in the 20^th century. He is the scriptwriter of the documentary Greek-American Radicals: the Untold Story (2013), the author of a book on the Cretan socialist intellectual Stavros Kallergis (Benaki Museum, 2013), and of Red America: Greek Iimmigrants and the Quest for a New World, 1900-1950 (Crete University Press, 2017). His latest book (co-authored with Dimitris Christopoulos) concerned the Macedonian Question (10+1 questions and answers on the Macedonian Question, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2018). Kostis was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, Princeton University and University of Oxford and has taught at the University of the Peloponnese, at Sciences Po and at Columbia University before joining College Year in Athens. He has written extensively on the Greek crisis, the European Left and the limits of political imagination in the post-1989 world and currently he is working on an international history of the Greek Left.

When:Wednesday 25 September 2019, 7:00 pm

Where:Greek Centre, Mezz, 168 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne