Center for Hellenic Studies
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Center for Hellenic Studies is a research institute for classics located in Washington, D.C. at 3100 NW Whitehaven Street. It is affiliated with Harvard University.
Nestled in Rock Creek Park behind Embassy Row, the Center offers fellowships to 12 fellows each year and provides them and their families with housing for the duration of their stay. Each year, the fellows are selected by a panel of senior fellows, who are selected by a panel of faculty from the classics department at Harvard, the so-called Senior Fellows. Fellows are typically post-docs, adjuncts, or associate professors from around the world (more specifically, almost exclusively from Europe or the US, where classics are typically studied).
The director of the Center is one of the senior fellows and a faculty member of the Harvard classics department. He manages the operation of the Center and plans long term research and publishing goals. The current faculty at the Center comprises the current director Greg Nagy as well as the assistant director Doug Frame.
The main building of the Center has a top notch library which the faculty and the fellows use for their research. It includes a rare book room with several ancient manuscripts. The main building also houses offices for the fellows, the staff, and the faculty. The mildly wooded campus also has a large mansion for the director's residence, a bungalow with apartments for the fellows with no families, and several cottages for the fellows with families. It has a few acres of land with access to paths through Rock Creek Park.
[edit] History
The Center was established in 1961 through an endowment made "exclusively for the establishment of an educational center in the field of Hellenic Studies designed to rediscover the humanism of the Hellenic Greeks" by the Old Dominion Foundation (the predecessor to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) entrusted to Harvard University. The land on which the Center was built was donated by Marie Beale in memory of her son Walker Blaine Beale (Harvard University class of 1918) who died in World War I. In 1996, the Italian Embassy bought about half of the land from the Center and built a new facility there.
