Collaboration
The Center For Hellenic Studies collaborates with several partners to promote Hellenic Studies and the electronic publication of scholarly works. Click on the links following each overview to read more about CHS partners.
The Milman Parry Collection
The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature is the largest single repository of South Slavic heroic song in the world. It comprises the following separate collections. All of these are currently housed in Harvard University's Widener Library, Room C:
- The texts and recordings of oral literature, including epic, lyric songs, and ballads, some stories, and conversations with singers and others, made by Professor Milman Parry of the Department of the Classics at Harvard University during the summer of 1933 and from June 1934 to September 1935, in Yugoslavia. Over 3,500 double-sided aluminum discs, with a playing time of ca. 4 min. each. Transcriptions of these songs are contained in ninety-five notebooks (14 cm. x 14 cm., 120sides in each); dictated songs are contained in ca. 800 notebooks (14 cm. x 14 cm., 70 sides in each).
- The Albanian Collection of some one hundred dictated epic texts was made by Lord in the north Albanian mountains in the Fall of 1937. These texts are contained in eleven notebooks (14 cm. x 14 cm., 200 sides in each.)
- The Lord Collection consists of epic texts collected by him in Yugoslavia in the summers of 1950, 1951, and 1966. The last of these is little known, but contains Christian songs from the mountain ranges from Niß to Prijepolje. These songs are contained on thirty-five reel tapes (acetate).
- The Lord and Bynum Collection consists of texts collected by Lord and Bynum in Yugoslavia in the summers of 1962-1965 and 1967.
The curators of the collection have received a Library Digital Initiative grant to digitize the entire collection. The digitization of materials in the Collection will have great benefit for researchers working in the fields of Classics, Folklore and Mythology, Comparative Literature and Slavic. It will also represent an invaluable teaching aid. The proposed project involves the digitization of both sound recordings and handwritten texts contained in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature in Widener Library. As noted above the Collection comprises several large collections of Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and Albanian songs, among other traditions, but by far the largest and most famous of these collections is that by Milman Parry and Albert Lord (1933-1935) in the former Yugoslavia. Parry and Lord were interested in the live performances of oral epic and made recordings on ca. 3,500 12" aluminum disks. These recordings were later transcribed in ninety-five notebooks. The first part of the project calls for the digitization of these sound recordings and their handwritten transcriptions. Besides the recorded songs, the 1933-1935 collection also contains songs that were taken down in Bosnia, Macedonia, Hercegovina, Croatia and so on by the traditional method of dictation in some 800 notebooks.
Digitized versions of these songs will be tagged to records in an already existing electronic database compiled by Matthew Kay (also published in hardcopy as part of the series The Milman Parry Studies in Oral Tradition, which researchers can use to search by singer, song, region, etc. Digitization will help make this invaluable collection, described by Béla Bartók as "a most important collection, unique of its kind" (The New York Times, June 28, 1942.), available to scholars worldwide through the Milman Parry Collection website, which is currently being developed. In addition to the 1933-35 collection, the curators intend to digitize texts belonging to two smaller collections, the Albanian Collection (1937) and the Lord Collection (1950-51).
Visit the Milman Parry Collection Home Page
The Stoa Consortium
The Center for Hellenic Studies is a partner with The Stoa Consortium, a leader in refereeing electronic scholarly publications in the humanities and developing new models of scholarly collaboration. Along with the Stoa Consortium, the Center enthusiastically promotes such models of electronic publication.
The CHS offers to contributors mutually non-exclusive rights of electronic publication of all material on the web site. That is, authors may reproduce or publish in other venues any material that they contribute to the CHS web site. Once a project, article, or book has been published by the CHS on its web site, it cannot be removed at the request of the author or editor. The content of various projects may at times be updated, revised, and/or redesigned to meet the changing needs of the web site as a whole, as well as to keep up with scholarship in the field. The authorship and editorship of individual contributions will be recognized and acknowledged on the CHS web site, and instructions for the citation of web publications will be provided to readers.
Visit The Stoa Consortium website
The Ilex Foundation
The Center For Hellenic Studies is currently collaborating with The Ilex Foundation on the digitization of The Milman Parry Collection. The Foundation promotes the study of humanistic traditions that derive from the civilizations of the Mediterranean and the Near East, and is dedicated to the dissemination of the research it promotes, seeking new models of publication that allow for a workable coexistence of hard-copy and electronic versions.
Visit The Ilex Foundation website
The Foundation for the Hellenic World
The Center for Hellenic Studies is a partner with The Foundation for the Hellenic World, a not-for-profit cultural institution based in Athens, Greece. The Foundation uses state-of-the-art, cutting-edge information and computer technology in its pursuit of the research, awareness and understanding of Hellenic history and culture.
Visit The Foundation for the Hellenic World website
Lexington Books
The Center for Hellenic Studies is a partner with Lexington Books, which publishes "Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches Series." Building on the foundations of scholarship within the disciplines of philology, philosophy, history, and archaeology, this series spans the continuum of Greek traditions extending from the second millennium, B.C., to the present - from the Archaic and Classical periods to today.The aim is to enhance perspectives by applying various disciplines to problems that have in the past been treated as the exclusive concern of a single given discipline. This series is edited by CHS Director Gregory Nagy.
Visit the Lexington Books website
Athens Dialogues
The Athens Dialogues project is an interdisciplinary program aiming to explore the relationship between Greek culture and the modern world. In the new phase an emphasis is given to the problems that concern modern man and the world that will have been formed within the next few decades. During the academic years 2012, 2013 and 2014, three events took place yearly.
Interdisciplinary approaches, stimulating debates, diachronic perspectives and the broad participation of great minds of our times made the Athens Dialogues a unique opportunity not to be missed.