“All this from a random exchange over lunch!” A scholar’s experience at the Institute for Advanced Study

IAS still welcomes hundreds of members each year across disciplines to follow where their intellectual curiosities lead. This academic year, as a Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Member, Ioannis Papadogiannakis is looking at the writings of early Christian theologians to study how emotion manifested itself in daily life in the eastern Roman empire around the 4th century, CE.

He shared a perspective on what it’s like to be a member at IAS, how it’s affected his scholarship, and the purpose of international academic exchange.

What’s a typical day at IAS like for you?

My day starts by immersing myself in the needs of my project, predominantly but not exclusively, in the writings of the fourth century church father John Chrysostom. The corpus of his homilies is a veritable encyclopedia of how emotions were experienced, conceptualized, theorized, and how they played out in everyday life in the ancient world. We possess around 820 genuine and 3,000 spurious homilies that are still ‘in the character’ of John Chrysostom so equally useful for my project. The weekly IAS colloquium for historians held on Mondays and the Ancient Studies Seminar, are the high points of the week providing the opportunity for a structured presentation and discussion of research ideas. On top of these, and depending on the day, I may choose to go to one of the many other seminars (attending seminars is not compulsory) that are running during the year or to a lecture or seminar at Princeton University, next door. Due to the highly interdisciplinary nature of my research on top of the Ancient Studies seminar, Medieval Studies, or Near Eastern Studies seminars offer additional enrichment and feedback especially if I choose to present work in progress.

I will then stop for lunch which is no ordinary activity. In fact, it is an unmissable opportunity to learn from and exchange ideas with some of the most brilliant researchers nationally and internationally in neighboring or seemingly less relevant fields. Lunchtime is intensely, intellectually satisfying partly because you never know what direction the discussion is going to take and what sort of ideas you may come away with. This is because, on top of the permanent and visiting members of the IAS, there is a steady flow of short-term visitors who attend lunch and provide a constant source of enrichment. For example, yesterday I chanced upon a Chinese scholar who is visiting IAS only for a few days and is an expert on Medieval China with an interest in the comparative study of Medieval China and Byzantium (an area I always wanted to explore). The conversation that resulted from that random encounter in the relaxed environment of the dining hall, laid the foundation for a future project. A few days ago, during a random conversation, I referred to a little-known study of a minor Stoic philosopher whose work on managing ancient estates proved foundational for running estates in Islamic culture. When my colleague, an expert in the field, had a look at his work, he wrote me the following message: ‘This is unbelievable, I spent quite some time on the classic texts about estate management - Cato, Varro, Columella...and I had never heard of this guy at all. He would be contemporary to some of these Latin sources. This is a huge addition to the corpus!’ All this from a random exchange over lunch!

After lunch, I delve into secondary studies on the topic of my research. At the same time, because of the long stretch of time I am given, I relish the opportunity to read liberally on a variety of studies which I have found. Over the years, this practice has helped me hone my insights and generate more research ideas. Occasionally, I may organize a short trip to the neighboring libraries of Princeton University and the Princeton Theological Seminary. The proximity of these libraries in combination with the wealth and the availability/accessibility of their collections provides anything a scholar may wish for.
Afternoon coffee/tea and cookies from 15.00-16.30 pm is yet another opportunity to mix and discuss in a relaxed setting any number of topics and ranges widely across all sorts of intellectual topics, from comparative linguistics (e.g. Greek and Jewish/Arabic and Chinese mappings of emotions) to anthropological concepts of the self. The stretch of time between 16.00 and 11.00 pm provides yet another opportunity to continue my uninterrupted engagement with my texts and ideas.

How has this experience affected your scholarship? What elements of it will you carry with you as you move forward in your career?

While carrying out my research, the sheer fact of being at the IAS feels like a protracted, continuous ‘brain storming’ of varying degrees of intensity. Such are the opportunities to interact with other scholars and to receive suggestions about important studies in other fields whose insights may be transferrable to mine that it makes this crosspollination a profoundly thrilling and exhilarating experience. These interactions enable me to compare and contrast my working methods and assess or reassess my views. There is not a day that goes by that I am not given the opportunity to learn something new, or to rethink what I already know. This is reinforced by the combination of an incredible wealth of resources with the unflagging commitment of the IAS to cater to every conceivable need of its Members both permanent and visiting and the quiet confidence that it instills that they are performing to their highest standards. The latter is an additional factor contributing to a prerequisite for research of the highest-caliber that is not often mentioned enough, good morale. This is because good morale, when present is barely noticed but is sorely missed when absent.

Among the many advantages that a fellowship at IAS offers is the precious commodity of time. Time to think long and hard about my project, time to keep abreast of the current scholarship, time to digest vast amounts of information and time to try my ideas on audiences that comprise some of the best scholars in their respective fields.
As well enabling me to carry out my project, my stay at IAS is gradually but surely reinvigorating and regenerating my research, catalysing further thinking on a number of areas in my field and is planting the seeds for a host of new projects and ideas for future research. Thanks to the countless discussions and interactions, I have gained a new appreciation for an openness to new ideas and methodologies and for the importance of exchanging ideas with other scholars.
Above I am left in awe when contemplating the vastness of knowledge.

This is the most enduring legacy of a fellowship at the IAS through my participation to the delicately, finely balanced and calibrated research climate and environment that it so carefully nurtures. Twenty years since I was a research assistant to a Member of IAS, my scholarship still feeds on the ferment of the ideas that I was exposed to then.

Has your IAS Membership changed your perspective on the value of international academic exchange or on the international community of scholars from Greece?

I cannot emphasise enough the value of international academic exchange especially in the way that is carried out at the IAS. The combination of time to pursue my individual project and the possibility of presenting it in the Ancient Studies seminar with other highly engaged brilliant scholars, many of whom represent different scholarly traditions with their own ‘gravitational pull’ and emphases, or to discuss it with permanent IAS members such as Professor Chaniotis who is leading international authority on the subject of emotions in antiquity, who are among the leading international authority in their respective fields, is unmatched. The recipe is unique to IAS and I am saying that based on my comparative experience from other research environments that I have found myself in the past. This exposure to an inexhaustible flow of ideas is incredibly enriching and stimulating especially for those who come from countries with weaker or underdeveloped research culture and has the potential to take their scholarship to a whole new level. I find it electrifying and infinitely motivating. This is a feeling that scholars from Greece who have been or are currently at IAS share enthusiastically. As teaching and administrative duties across most universities nationally and internationally place a heavier load on many colleagues, the paradigm that IAS is setting becomes all the more crucial.

Your interim report mentions “the burgeoning scholarship on ancient emotions.” Is this an area that’s been neglected? What’s the case for giving ancient emotions greater attention?

Whereas emotions and emotional experience may have once been seen as too ephemeral, unrecoverable or idiosyncratic for systematic scholarly analysis, scholars are increasingly considering the ways in which the study of emotion connects with fundamental questions about the relationship between self and society, mind and body, biology and culture, and the representation of lived experience. Modern neurophysiology has independently confirmed what Aristotle (the first theoretician of emotions in the Western world) had first intuited and then theorized 2,500 ago; that every decision we make has been in various degrees but invariably affectively charged. This makes all the more necessary their study not only in order to better understand the ancient world but also because much of our current emotional vocabulary in the West is part of the lexical and conceptual legacy of this period, which lies somewhere along the developmental line towards the emotional world of the modern West, informing nearly all efforts to understand those of other cultures to date.

Carrying out research on emotions at Princeton, both the IAS (Professor Chaniotis) and Princeton University (Bob Kaster), is the ideal place as it has promoted the study of emotions in the ancient world more than any other place in the US.

What do you hope the future of Hellenic studies will hold?

Hellenic studies as an academic subject offers the opportunity to those who pursue them to tap into one of the richest repositories of ideas and values in human history. Properly funded, they offer endless possibilities for innovative, thought-provoking, cutting age research that can be a potent reminder and source of infinite enrichment of what it means to be human.