A Festschrift for Theofanis Stavrou

Just released is a wide-ranging and very hefty Festschrift for a Greek-American scholar: Thresholds Into The Orthodox Commonwealth: Essays In Honor Of Theofanis G. Stavrou, ed., Lucien J. Frary (Slavica Publications, 2017), 687pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

This volume is a tribute to Theofanis G. Stavrou, Professor of Russian and Near Eastern History and Director of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Minnesota. A generous and penetrating scholar, as well as an award-winning teacher and mentor, Professor Stavrou is well known for his infectious enthusiasm for collaborative scholarship and wide-ranging expertise in Russian history and culture, Eastern Orthodox Church history, Modern Greek literature, and other fields. The forty-four contributors to this collection are a diverse group of mainly senior American scholars who have published erudite monographs related to the fields of Slavic, European, Mediterranean, and Eastern Orthodox studies.

Professor Stavrou has been a veritable institution in the United States for more than forty years. His works are cited broadly and his research has more often been confirmed than challenged over his career—something others could only wish for themselves. Professor Stavrou has also been the academic advisor of several generations of scholars in North America and Europe, and his ideas have influenced even young scholars who were not ever formally his students. His generosity and breadth of knowledge has been and continues to be tapped by scholars around the world, yet he remains modest about his own accomplishments and place in the field(s) he has pursued. Despite that modesty, this volume convincingly demonstrates that no one has earned the honor of a Festschrift more than he has.

The publisher has provided us with a PDF of the table of contents here.

I've met the editor a couple of times at ASEC conferences over the years, and he's always been a very witty and interesting lecturer about Russian-Greek connections, especially in the 19th century, which he has covered in such collections as Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered, a collection edited with Mara Kozelsky.

He himself wrote the 2014 book from Oxford University Press, Russia and the Making of Modern Greek Identity, 1821-1844.

Russian and Greek Identities

I've met the author of this book several times at conferences, where his lectures are always both fascinating and entertaining. Much of his earlier research and presentations were indeed precisely on questions of Greek religious and political identity, and the complexities of both that he unearthed were very interesting indeed. Now we have a book-length treatment of relations between two major European Orthodox powers: Russia and the Making of Modern Greek Identity, 1821-1844 (Oxford, 2015), 304pp.

About this book we are told:

The birth of the Greek nation in 1830 was a pivotal event in modern European history and in the history of nation-building in general. As the first internationally recognized state to appear on the map of Europe since the French Revolution, independent Greece provided a model for other national movements to emulate. Throughout the process of nation formation in Greece, the Russian Empire played a critical part. Drawing upon a mass of previously fallow archival material, most notably from Russian embassies and consulates, this volume explores the role of Russia and the potent interaction of religion and politics in the making of modern Greek identity. It deals particularly with the role of Eastern Orthodoxy in the transformation of the collective identity of the Greeks from the Ottoman Orthodox millet into the new Hellenic-Christian imagined community. Lucien J. Frary provides the first comprehensive examination of Russian reactions to the establishment of the autocephalous Greek Church, the earliest of its kind in the Orthodox Balkans, and elucidates Russia's anger and disappointment during the Greek Constitutional Revolution of 1843, the leaders of which were Russophiles. Employing Russian newspapers and "thick journals" of the era, Frary probes responses within Russian reading circles to the reforms and revolutions taking place in the Greek kingdom. More broadly, the volume explores the making of Russian foreign policy during the reign of Nicholas I (1825-55) and provides a distinctively transnational perspective on the formation of modern identity.

Religion and Russian Foreign Policy

Last weekend, while at the fantastic ASEC conference at Ohio State, I listened to Lucien Frary present on his research into the role of Orthodoxy in shaping Russian foreign policy in the nineteenth century, especially vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire and its many Orthodox Christians, for whom Russia felt some solicitude. The role of religion in Russian politics and policy continues to come in for fresh examination, including now in a forthcoming book by Alicja Curanovi: The Religious Factor in Russia's Foreign Policy (Routledge Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe Series, 2012, 400pp.).


About this book, the publisher says that it

examines how religion interacts with Russian foreign policy, arguing that religion is an important and neglected factor in shaping Russia’s outlook towards international relations. It surveys the importance of religion in Russian social life - past and present - and considers the range of attitudes which are affected by religion – such as Russian nationalism, notions of Slavic solidarity, the divine mission of Russian Orthodox civilisation, Russian imperialism, and Russia’s special approach towards Islam. The book discusses how religious organizations, especially the Russian Orthodox Church, operate in international relations, pursuing, through ‘religious diplomacy’ their own interests and those of the Russian state; explores how religious ideas and culture linked to religion impinge on Russian attitudes and identity, and thereby affect policy; and demonstrates how policy influenced by religion impacts on Russian foreign policy in practice in a wide range of examples, including Russia’s relations with other Orthodox countries, non-orthodox Western countries, Muslim countries, Israel and the Vatican.