ACT News

On Friday December 21st the Christmas Charity Drive that had been running for a number of weeks was concluded. Boxes of canned and dry food, cleaning products, toiletries, office supplies and stationary which had been gathered in bins on campus and in the study abroad student apartments overflowed. Products donated by Anatolia High-School and ACT students and staff were moved on that day by student volunteers with the Anatolia maintenance truck, to the offices of Desmos on Lagada Street.

Dr. Livingtson Merchant was the featured participant in a round table discussion on the theme «Good students, bad students» on December 17, in the Bissell Library. Dr. Merchant was joined by a group of ACT faculty and a small cohort of Maria Patsarika's freshman honors students.
 

   It might well have been the inverse: «The Crisis in Greece and the Future of the EU».  Semantics aside, the core problem I will address is whether the ever imminent bankruptcy, and potential collapse, of the Greek state is a European problem. What better place to discuss this than at the Levitt Center in the company of that preeminent Europeanist, my friend and host Alan Cafruny.

On December 11, the Dukakis Center teamed up with representatives of the Athens-based civil society initiative Repo[we]rGreece. Alexandros Costopoulos and retired US diplomat Alec Mally met with several dozen ACT and study abroad students to discuss the mission of their initiative, launched in the fall of 2011.

The Dukakis Center hosted two events on cross-cultural understanding featuring Livingston Merchant, Jr., former President of Robert College, who has spent much of the last two years in predominantly Kurdish areas of northern Iraq (December 10, Niarchos Teleconference Center) and Hercules Millas, an expert on Greek-Turkish relations (November 14, Bissell Library). Earlier in the term, the Center hosted Dr. Devin Naar, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, for a lecture titled “The Rise and Fall of the Jews of Salonica, 1492-1943,”(October 15).
 

Inaugural Business & Politics Forum
 

The Dukakis Center and the Anatolia Business School co-hosted the inaugural Business & Politics Forum on Wednesday, December 5, at the Elektra Palace Hotel in downtown Thessaloniki.

More than 130 students, faculty, and professionals from public and private universities throughout Northern and Central Greece came together at ACT for a student-oriented workshop on Startup Business Idea-generation & Pitching. 

On October 15th 2012, in the Bissell Library, Dr. Devin Naar delivered a Dukakis Seminar Series lecture on “The Rise and Fall of the Jews of Salonica, 1492-1943.”
 
Dr. Naar is Marsha & Jay Glazer Assistant Professor in Jewish Studies, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. He completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2011 and was the winner of the 2011 Elizabeth Spilman Rosenfield Prize awarded annually to the best written dissertation in the Department of History at Stanford University.