From Orphans to Humanitarians: Wartime Refugees and the Making of Greek America

In this lecture, Thomas W. Gallant explores the critical role played by a small group of Greek children who had been relocated from the war-torn eastern Mediterranean to the US during the 1820s. Through an examination of Photios Karavelis Fisk’s life, the talk examines how and why some of these children became prominent figures in the abolitionist movement and other humanitarian causes. It concludes with the claim that this small group, who throughout their lives foregrounded their Greek identity, established a presence in American life, far above their modest numbers and that they laid the foundations for the Greek-American community during the 20th century.

 

About the Speaker:

Thomas W. Gallant holds the Nicholas Family Endowed Chair in Modern Greek History and is Professor of History and Archaeology in the History Department and the Center for Hellenic Studies at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in Classical Archaeology and has been a professor at universities in the US and Canada. He is the author of twelve books and over 50 articles; among his most recent books are Modern Greece from Independence to the Present (3rd edition, 2021), Harvesting the Gifts of the Sea: Aegean Societies and Marine Life (2021), and Νεώτερη Ελλάδα. Από τον Πόλεμο της Ανεξαρτησίας μέχρι τις μέρες μας (2017). Forthcoming are Murder on Black Mountain: Love and Death on a Nineteenth-Century Greek Island and Europe’s First Modern War: the 1897 Greek-Ottoman War. He was the inaugural director of the Center for Hellenic Studies at UCSD and continues to direct the vibrant Ph.D. program in Modern Greek history. He has served on the Modern Greek Studies Association’s Executive Board multiple times and in numerous capacities, including being President from 2003 to 2005. He was an editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies from 2015 to 2019; currently he is editor-in-chief of the ten-volume Edinburgh History of the Greeks and the Routledge Handbook of Modern Greek History.