Professor Vrasidas Karalis will present online lecture entitled " Lord Byron: The Poet and the Revolutionary in Greece ", on Thursday 7 October, at 7.00 pm, as part of the Greek History and Culture Seminars, offered by the Greek Community of Melbourne.
It would be a serious omission if we celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution without presenting the most notorious celebrity of the time, Lord Byron, who fell in love with its cause and died for its sake. The lecture will offer a brief appreciation of Byron’s life and poetry and explore some of his works that deal with the Greek question in all its dimensions. Lord Byron was one the few English poets and artists who avoided the exoticization and idealization of the Greeks as people and expressed the incessant struggle for political liberation. His personality, colourful and contradictory, overshadows his effort through poetry to translate a historical event into symbolic landscape. The presentation will focus briefly on these aspects of his otherwise rather neglected poetic achievement by our contemporaries.

Professor Vrasidas Karalis holds the Chair of Sir Nicholas Laurantos in Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies at the University of Sydney. He works in the area of Greek Cultural Studies since the Byzantine and Modern periods and is the editor of Modern Greek Studies (Australian and New Zealand.). He has published extensively with special emphasis on Byzantine historiography, Modern Greek political life, Greek Cinema, Balkan culture, European Union and Greece. His translated works include Patrick White’s Voss and The Vivisector, as well as well Michael Dransfield’s poems into Greek. His main publications in English include, A History of Greek Cinema (Continuum 2012), Realism in Greek Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2017), Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris (Brandl & Sclesinger, 2007), The Demons of Athens (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2013), Reflections on Presence (re.Press, 2016) and The Glebe Point Road Blues (2020). He has also edited the collections Cornelios Castoriadis and the Project of Radical Democracy (2013), Martin Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Being (2008), Power, Justice and Judgement in Hannah Arendt (2012). He has been the recipient of awards in translation and nominations for his critical work and was awarded the Federation Medal of Australia in 2003. He is currently working on the work of the cinematographers George Miller and Theo Angelopoulos.

The event will be simulcasted YouTube Live, Facebook Live, and Twitter Broadcast.
You don't need an account to watch the live broadcast with any of the above services. However, if you want to participate in the Q&A at the end of the seminar you'll need an account with the equivalent service in order to post your question in the comments / chat.