[MGSA-L] Professor André Gerolymatos

MGSA exec. director mgsa.org at gmail.com
Sat Jun 1 05:52:02 PDT 2019


MGSA members will be saddened to hear of the death of André Gerolymatos on
30 May, 2019.
Professor Gerolymatos was Hellenic Canadian Congress of British Columbia
Chair in Hellenic Studies and, since 2011, Director of the Stavros Niarchos
Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University. A
distinguished historian of military and diplomatic history, many of you
will also remember him as our gracious host at the 2009 MGSA Symposium in
Vancouver.

https://www.sfu.ca/hellenic-studies/newsroom/news/ag.html

His longtime faculty colleague at Simon Fraser University, Professor
Dimitris Krallis, was kind enough to share with us his own personal
reflections on André Gerolymatos:

"We admire creative scholars, people whose writing forces you to reconsider
all that you know, women and men whose work puts a smile on your face,
even as you cry "aha, now I get it"! Today I wish to celebrate a variant to
that earlier image, the scholar who creates. And so I write about my
colleague of twelve years and collaborator on myriad Hellenic Studies
related projects, the late André Gerolymatos. A scholar who creates exists
in the interstices between library and administration, academia and
main-street, lecture-hall and board room. The scholar who creates foregoes
sabbaticals during twenty-three years at his institution to dedicate
himself to the creation of narratives in the form of books, on the one
hand, but also, on the other, the setting up of the infrastructure that
will sustain narrative creation long after he is retired. The scholar who
creates Engages the World – attuned to his institution’s own motto, before
that motto was ever a glimmer of an idea in a marketing guru’s brain – and
straddles intellectual creation and policy, scholarly writing and radio
commentary, knowledge and knowledge translation. The scholar who creates
assumes a well-funded professorship and, rather than live the life of a
gentleman scholar, spending his generous research funding on leisurely
trips away from campus on his way to "Euphoric State University", instead
launches himself on a trail of program-building that leads to the hire of
five other academic colleagues and three supporting staff. The scholar who
creates bucks the trend of cuts in academic positions and engages a major
philanthropic foundation in a vision of growth, outreach, and creative
knowledge translation. The scholar who creates brings together humanists,
technologists, universities and governments from multiple countries in
creative collaborations that straddle oceans. The scholar who creates
inspires a work ethic of engagement, commitment, and ambition in the people
surrounding him. The scholar who creates writes about divisions and strife
even as he brings together, in projects, conferences, and symposia, the
right and the left, the indigenous and the settler, the journalist, the
poet, the actor and the scholar. I worked closely over the past twelve
years of my career at SFU with André Gerolymatos. From that night of my
campus interview when we connected on the way to the candidate's dinner by
way of stories about Bartzotas and the KKE, to endless discussions on
future grant projects, disagreements on scholarly approaches, bike lanes,
and other trifles, and through a relentless process of program growth
I came to appreciate the drive and dedication that makes the scholar who
creates. My colleagues in Hellenic Studies owe that scholar a debt of
gratitude for his enthusiastic readiness to take us onboard on his creative
journey."

We extend our deepest sympathies to Professor Gerolymatos' family, friends,
and colleagues. May he rest in peace.

-- 
Vangelis Calotychos
MGSA Executive Director
Visiting Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://maillists.uci.edu/pipermail/mgsa-l/attachments/20190601/3c3f7974/attachment.html>


More information about the MGSA-L mailing list