Introduction: 1821 and the Crooked Line to the Nation-State


Published: Jan 7, 2022
Keywords:
Greek Revolution 1821 Nation Nationalism Historiography
Ada A. Dialla
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2728-9783
Yanni D. Kotsonis
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5132-3027
Abstract

This special issue is the outcome of a renewed interest in the study of 1821 and has its own history. It is the result of a series of workshops co-organised by New York University under the auspices of the Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia (New York) and the Research Centre for the Humanities (Athens). These workshops brought together historians and social scientists from different universities, and different national and academic environments, to discuss how the history of 1821 could be reconceptualised. 1821 was and still is, par excellence, an example of the political uses and abuses of history. So we seek to understand the revolution in terms of its own present. We titled these workshops as “1821: What Made it Greek and Revolutionary” because we aimed to view the events as if visiting them for the first time and reconsider them beyond the teleology which so much characterises any kind of revolutionary narrative.

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Author Biographies
Ada A. Dialla, Athens School of Fine Arts
Ada Dialla is Professor of European and Russian History at the Department of Theory and History of Art, School of Fine Arts (Athens). Her main research interests are 19th and 20th century Russian and European history. Her recent book is co-authored with Alexis Heraclides and is entitled Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015) and her recent articles are: “Thinking Europe on Europe’s Margins: Alexander Sturdza, Konstantinos Oikonomos and Russian-Greek Orthodoxy in the Early Nineteenth Century”,  The Historical Review/La Revue Historique 16 (2020): 141-166, https://doi.org/10.12681/hr.22823, and “The Congress of Vienna, the Russian Empire and the Greek Revolution: Rethinking Legitimacy”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 39, no 1 (May 2021).
Yanni D. Kotsonis, New York University
Yanni Kotsonis is Professor of European History at New York University. He is the author of Making Peasants Backward: Managing Populations in Russian Agricultural Cooperative, 1861–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014) and Η ελληνική επανάσταση και οι αυτοκρατορίες: Η Γαλλία και οι Έλληνες, 1797–1830 [The Greek revolution and the empires: France and the Greeks, 1797–1830] (Athens: Alexandria, 2020). He is the founding director of the NYU Jordan Center and the father of three children.
References
Kellner, Hans. Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
Kotsonis, Yanni. Η ελληνική επανάσταση και οι αυτοκρατορίες: Η Γαλλία και οι Έλληνες, 1797–1830 [The Greek revolution and the empires: France and the Greeks, 1797–1830]. Athens: Alexandria, 2020.
Sebastán, Javier Fernández, and Pierre Rosanvallon. “Intellectual History and Democracy: An Interview with Pierre Rosanvallon.” Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 4 (2007): 703–715.
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