Early Travelers to Athens Featured in CYA's Virtual Lecture Series

College Year in Athens (CYA), a study abroad program focusing upon the history and civilization of Greece and the Mediterranean region, is launching a virtual lecture series starting with the early travelers to Athens.
The lecture, titled “Travels to Athens from Cyriac to Baedeker,” is scheduled for Wednesday July 8, 2020, at 12 p.m. (EST) / 7 p.m. Athens time, and will be given by CYA professor Robert K. Pitt.
He will introduce students to a number of early travelers to understand why and how they came to the great city, and will explore how travel literature came to change and direct the experiences of visitors up to the twentieth century.
Robert Pitt is a Greek historian and epigraphist of the Classical and Hellenistic periods whose research interests include the Athenian Empire, Athenian Topography, and the financing and administration of public building projects in the Greek world.
His latest research includes a new corpus of the Athenian funerary monuments of the British Museum, as well as a series of publications on early travelers to Greece whose archival papers he has been working on at the British Library. As a site epigraphist, he has worked on excavations in Greece, Turkey and Albania.
Dr. Pitt joined CYA in 2014 following seven years as Assistant Director of the British School at Athens.
Facilitating the discussion will be Christine Harrison, who teaches the CYA course entitled “Becoming a Traveler: Writing on Greece.”
Dr. Harrison earned her PhD from the University of Birmingham (UK), with a focus on the contemporary literary representations of the early modern period.
Her current research interests center on representations of space and place in contemporary fiction and literary nonfiction, uses of the past in contemporary debates on gender and ethnicity, rewritings of medieval and early modern literature, and the role of onsite learning in higher education.
She is both a member of the CYA’s Literature faculty and their Academic Skills Advisor.
The CYA is a non-profit educational institution that has been acting as a cultural and educational bridge between the U.S. and Greece for over half a century.
Its mission is to offer each student an academically rigorous program of studies combined with the vibrant experience of day-to-day contact with the people, monuments, and landscapes of Greece — a rapidly changing country with a uniquely varied past.
College Year in Athens is dedicated to fostering an engagement with Greece that encourages personal discovery, growth, and cross-cultural sensitivity. Its ultimate goal is for participants to return home academically inspired, intellectually stimulated, and with a passionate commitment to the furtherance of international and intercultural understanding.
To participate in this fascinating live discussion, please register on Zoom.