By Catherine Curan 

The Seeger Center has launched a Wintersession Institute seminar program at the Princeton Athens Center.

From January 13-24, two cohorts of graduate students participated in “Coin Production and Circulation in Byzantine Greece and Anatolia, 325-750" and “The Monarchic Paradigm: Transregional Imperial Ideology at the End of Late Antiquity."

Princeton University’s Curator of Numismatics Alan Stahl led the numismatics workshop. András Kraft, a fellow at the Einstein Center Chronoi in Berlin, and Panagiotis Theodoropoulos, who works at the Library of the Church of Greece, taught “The Monarchic Paradigm.” In total, eighteen students – including five from Princeton University and thirteen from Greece and Turkey – attended these non-credit, intensive tuition-free workshops.

A companion program to the Seeger Center’s Summer Institute at the Princeton Athens Center, the Wintersession Institute seminars coincides with Wintersession at Princeton University. Launched in January 2021, Wintersession is a two-week series of events and workshops open to Princeton students, researchers, faculty and staff. 

“Now that the academic calendar includes Wintersession events in January, that gives us an opportunity to host a Wintersession Institute program at the Princeton Athens Center,” said Dimitri Gondicas, director of the Seeger Center. “Like the Summer Institutes at the Princeton Athens Center, they enable us to include Princeton students and other international students in intensive two-week workshops.”

The two-week workshops emphasized interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and collaborative learning. Seminars were held on weekday mornings at the Princeton Athens Center, enriched by student presentations and lectures from visiting scholars. Afternoons were devoted to on-site study at museums, libraries, and archaeological sites. Participants gained deep knowledge of the seminar topics, expanded scholarly networks, and new perspectives on their dissertation research.

“It was an exhilarating experience to teach a seminar that included graduate students from Greek and Turkish universities, who have quite different experiences and perspectives to those at Princeton,” said Stahl.

The Seeger Center offered the numismatics seminar, which was cosponsored by Princeton University Library, the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, the Humanities Council, and the Department of Art and Archaeology.

Stahl taught students about the numismatic collections at Princeton University Library, one of the few academic coin collections in America, and gave a lecture titled “Connecting to Numismatics at Princeton,” cosponsored by the Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation. In addition, he provided an overview of the FLAME project (Framing the Late Antique and early Medieval Economy), a collaborative digital humanities initiative based at Princeton that includes contributions from scholars worldwide. Scholars Ceren Ünal and Yannis Stoyas also visited the seminar.

Ilia Curto Pelle was awarded an A.B. from Princeton in 2022, concentrating in Classics and earning a certificate from the Program in Hellenic Studies. Curto Pelle has served as the assistant coordinator for FLAME since 2020, helping populate FLAME’s database with numismatic data, and is now a doctoral candidate in the Department of History. 

Engaging with scholars on-site during the Wintersession Institute proved pivotal for Curto Pelle’s scholarship, fostering a deeper understanding of numismatics research and sparking fresh ideas. 

“What transformed these two weeks from an excellent course into a once-in-a-lifetime experience were the on-hands activities at the Agora and Corinth excavations and the National Numismatic Museum,” said Curto Pelle. 

He added: “Speaking with the staff responsible for the excavation, preservation, and publication of coins from the two sites gave me unique insight into the methodological caveats that must be considered when interpreting coin finds from sites with a long history of excavation. The staff of the excavations and museum also generously responded to my questions. The Wintersession Institute gave me a firmer understanding of the limitations of numismatics data in Greece and Turkey and the challenges scholars face. Also, it inspired me to think about new and more creative methods of collaborative research to tackle these challenges. 

“Overall, my participation in the Wintersession Institute was a transformative experience, one that I believe will be extremely influential for my work at the FLAME project, my dissertation research in Greece, and my future career in Byzantine history.” 

The 2025 Wintersession Institute on Byzantine history reflected the global and regional development of the Seeger Center’s academic community. Kraft and Theodoropoulos came to the Seeger Center as postdoctoral fellows in 2019-20, returning to the Princeton Athens Center in 2023 to teach a Summer Institute titled “Visions of Identity and Salvation in the Eastern Roman Empire.” 

The themes of the 2023 workshop and the 2025 Wintersession Institute built on the research they undertook at Princeton. Kraft said the goal for these seminars was to “provide a new approach to the history of the Byzantine Empire and by extension the medieval world … placing the anxieties over the end of times and the salvation of the soul at the center of political decision-making and the complex mechanisms of the formation of communal identities.” 

Feedback and insight from students at the Wintersession Institute inspired Kraft and Theodoropoulos to continue developing this research project.

“It is an immense pleasure to be part of the Seeger Center’s vibrant community and to contribute to its rich academic program,” said Theodoropoulos.

John Ladouceur, a Ph.D. candidate in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity subfield and a Stanley J. Seeger Graduate Award recipient, returned to Princeton with an expanded framework for his doctoral research. 

“My participation in “The Monarchic Paradigm” has enriched my dissertation research on the development of Christian kingship in late antique Ethiopia by helping me situate my findings within a much broader cultural, geographical, and chronological context than I had previously considered. Dialoguing with other scholars working across countries and disciplines on issues of Christian imperial ideology has provided me with new perspectives, methodologies, and conceptual vocabularies with which to frame my own interventions. I also met new colleagues and future collaborators whose feedback I will continue to elicit for years to come,” said Ladouceur.