DIRECTOR’S BOOKSHELF
An Agora of Ideas
Seeger Center Director Dimitri Gondicas in conversation with
Richard Calis
The Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies supports Princeton graduate students and postdoctoral and visiting fellows who conduct research on Hellenic studies topics at the University. Alumni and former fellows have published hundreds of books and thousands of articles. Their scholarship reflects the broad, interdisciplinary nature of Hellenic studies, spanning fields from history to religion to literature and periods from antiquity to the present.
In the June 6, 2025, edition of Director's Bookshelf, Seeger Center Director Dimitri Gondicas speaks with Richard Calis, author of "The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius," published by Harvard University Press in January 2025. Calis earned a Ph.D. in history at Princeton in 2020 and received a Stanley J. Seeger Graduate Award. He is an assistant professor in intellectual history at Utrecht University.
How did this book project begin?
It began when my supervisor, Anthony Grafton, told me about a sixteenth-century edition of Homer's poems annotated by Martin Crusius, the protagonist of my book. This edition, which is now in Firestone Library, was the gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ted Athanassiades, Princeton Class of 1961, in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Program in Hellenic Studies, with additional funding from the Friends of the Princeton University Library. This text gives wonderful insight into the ways in which Crusius, a sixteenth-century professor of Greek, plied his trade. During my first summer as a Princeton doctoral candidate, I traveled to Tübingen to examine other books and manuscripts that Crusius left us, discovering a treasure trove. Hundreds of his annotated books and notebooks reveal in incredible detail what Greek life under Ottoman rule was like. I decided to make this archive the focus of my dissertation, which I rewrote for the book.
Please share some highlights from your experience at the Seeger Center.
There are too many! Visiting the Hagios Ioannis Prodromos monastery in Serres as a participant in the Mount Menoikeion Seminar and learning about Greek history in Thessaloniki was incredibly inspiring and shaped my research in many ways. My language classes at the Seeger Center were also formative. Overall, the Monday lunches were the absolute highlight. The Center was a warm and welcoming community, and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting colleagues and new people over lunch; as someone who was not trained in modern Greek studies – I had studied classics and history – that was an education in itself.
How did participating in the Center's interdisciplinary academic community impact your work?
My book is about a sixteenth-century German professor of Greek who became early modern Europe's foremost expert on Ottoman Greek affairs. This topic compelled me to learn about early modern Lutheran Germany, Ottoman studies, Greek history, and early modern intellectual culture in the broadest sense – different fields of research that require diverse skills. I had to learn new languages and, in the case of early Modern Greek, figure out the orthography and paleography. Princeton gave me the time to develop my skills in these areas. Being part of the Seeger Center’s academic community was particularly helpful, as there are so many Ottomanists and scholars of Modern Greek. I benefited from exchanging ideas with them, especially when it came to the languages that I needed.
What would you like your readers to learn?
My book operates on multiple levels. A single person and his archive are the point of departure, but the book is really a study of a person, a place, and a period. I use Crusius' "discovery" of Greek life under Ottoman rule as a point of entry to examine how early modern Europeans understood cultural and religious differences. Tracing how and what he learned about Ottoman Greece – without ever traveling there! – affords us much insight into the long history of Philhellenism and Orientalism. It shows the deep roots of these frameworks and how notions of cultural and religious difference often take shape when worlds collide and people from different backgrounds meet. I aim to demonstrate the significance of early modern Greece as a model for articulating difference.
Intellectual histories like mine are often – too frequently, in my opinion – dominated by ideas. They are about what people thought, yet the people themselves can be surprisingly invisible. My book aims to highlight the human element in our intellectual histories. My book is populated by people – scholars with bodies and social lives, whose day-to-day business shaped the development of their ideas. I am not the first or the last to adopt this approach, but since I had such a wonderful archive to learn from, my book can bring us much closer to understanding how our predecessors went about their work than in most other cases. I hope this framework can serve as a model or as inspiration for future research.
A transformative journey to Greece inspired Stanley J. Seeger to found Hellenic studies programs at Princeton. Please tell us about a journey that expanded your intellectual horizons or influenced your research.
Ironically, I had never been to mainland Greece before starting my graduate studies. As a child, I had been to Rhodes on vacation. But I had never visited Athens or any major archeological site elsewhere in Greece. My first exposure to Greece as an adult was during a Seeger Center trip to Thessaloniki, where I discovered not the Greece of my classical education but a place with an intricate and tangible connection to Greece's Ottoman history. That has shaped how I understand and teach Greece to this day.
Photos of Dimitri Gondicas and Richard Calis by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy.
To read previous Director’s Bookshelf interviews, please visit our archive.
To learn more about books by members of the Princeton Seeger Center academic community, please visit our Publications page.