James and Carolyn Kolokotrones Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship
The James and Carolyn Kolokotrones Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship supports all costs related to graduate student travel to Greece for research purposes, primarily during the summer. For information about this fellowship, contact hellenic@humnet.ucla.edu
2023-24
Paul Melas is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. His dissertation, titled Caring for the Spirit: Camaraderie and Asceticism on the Holy Mountain, attends to the contemporary condition of the Orthodox Christian monastic community of Mount Athos, Greece. This work conceptualizes Mount Athos as a bordered but inherently connected space, and investigates the communicative, material and symbolic circuits which connect its members to individuals and groups in the “outside world.” For a total of fourteen months between 2022 and 2023 he conducted ethnographic fieldwork for this project in several Athonite monasteries and in Athonite dependency parishes in Greece, Finland and Türkiye. Research participants included Athonite monks and novices, pilgrims, wage-laborers on the Athonite peninsula, and dependency parishioners (both men and women). Generously supported by the James and Carolyn Kolokotrones Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship, in the summer of 2024 he will conduct several months of ethnographic research in two additional Athonite dependency parishes in Athens, Greece where he intends to interview women who have cultivated relationships with particular monks and monasteries. In light of the ‘Law of Avaton,’ which denies ‘women’ entry into the Athonite peninsula but does not foreclose to them the opportunity to engage in certain modes of Orthodox devotion centered around Mount Athos, this research will reveal an important and indeed surprising aspect of the monastic community’s broader relational network.
2023-24
Luis Rodriguez-Perez, a graduate student in the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, will be undertaking during summer 2024 several projects both within and outside of Greece. First, he will be joining GEFYRA, an initiative between UCLA and Simon Fraser University, which is currently working on several cultural heritage projects in the village of Geraki, Laconia. Afterwards, he will be joining the excavations at the Athenian Agora as a digital technician and archaeologist. During the excavations, he will also be working on his master’s thesis which is centered on the Odeion of Agrippa in the Athenian Agora. This early Roman-period building is in the center of Athens, which marks Rome’s early envelopment of the city within its larger empire. For this project, he will be visiting the libraries at the American School of Classical Studies as a visiting student. After the Athenian Agora excavations, he will briefly join excavations at the Roman site of Industria, Italy, before returning to Athens to finish his thesis.
2022-23
Nicolyna Enriquez is a recipient of a 2023 James and Carolyn Kolokotrones Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship. Situated at the intersection of island studies and environmental history, Nicolyna Enriquez’s dissertation, Surrounded by Sea, Rooted in Land: An Environmental History of Late Byzantine Art on Crete, explores how rural Cretan villagers in late Byzantium (13th-15th century) perceived and experienced their insular environment. Focusing on the provinces of Selino and Pediada, she brings together visual imagery, architectural studies, archaeological research, and topographical analysis into a comprehensive discussion of Late Byzantine island communities and the surrounding terrestrial and maritime world. By combining a study of the placement of churches in the larger island landscape with the visual evidence on their walls, Nicolyna argues that these rural churches are not simply mirrors of the heavenly realm (a metaphor articulated by Byzantine theologians) but are simultaneously deeply connected to the surrounding environment. This dissertation proposes a broader understanding of the relationship between rural island villagers and the sea and land from which they gained sustenance, engaged in trade, and, in the case of climate, from which they requested divine protection. For the summer of 2023, Nicolyna will continue to document the rural churches of the two provinces under study while also using her time on the island to trace the routes and pathways which connect these churches to their local communities.
2022-23
Sofia Pitouli is a recipient of a 2023 James and Carolyn Kolokotrones Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship. The fellowship will enable Pitouli to study the work of Greek architect Dimitris Pikionis (1887-1968) and his vision of “Japanese” as negotiated in his tectonic and landscaping projects spanning from 1933 to 1958. In 1954, the Greek government commissioned Dimitris Pikionis to landscape the area around the Acropolis. Within the 80,000 square meter complex, Pikionis synthesized a modern Greek identity by intertwining the narratives of heritage emerging from the classical Greek and Byzantine past. Pikionis’ modern-era Greekness, however, laid its inventiveness elsewhere––in Japan. Her research, Toward Greekness: Dimitris Pikionis’ Architectural Fantasies of Japan, centers around the question of how Pikionis employed and negotiated a version of Japan in his tectonic works in the decade of the 1930s and traces its influence leading up to the Acropolis project. This award will allow her to travel to Athens and Thessaloniki to study the archives of the open-air theatre Marika Kotopouli at Heyden Street in Athens (1933) and the Experimental School of Thessaloniki (1935), described as “of a slightly Japanese character.” Pikionis never visited Japan but was close to Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), who traveled to China and Japan and documented his insights in his book Le Jardin des rochers (1936). Kazantzakis collaborated with Pikionis on an essay about Japanese gardens and their spatial organization. She will also travel to Heraklion to study Kazantzakis’ letters to Pikionis during and after his trip to Japan and document his collection of Japanese works.
2021-22
Collin Moat is a recipient of the James and Carolyn Kolokotrones Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship for 2022. Collin Moat (Ph.D. student, Classics) is broadly interested in the Classical Environmental Humanities, and his current research focuses on the dynamic relationship in early Greek literature between heroes and trees, which were both revered as proverbially persistent, sometimes sacred beings and considered a valuable source of raw material. As a part of this research, he recently presented a paper on Achilles’ entanglement with the Pelian spear in the Iliad at the Classical Association of the Middle West and South’s annual conference. He will use the fellowship to support his travel to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, where he will continue his research and participate in the Academic Year program, which allows students to study the art, archaeology, history, and environment of Greece firsthand.