"Greece: An Unintended Nation?" with Dr. Alex Tipei

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University is pleased to present Dr. Alex Tipei, Université de Montréal.

Join us Friday, October 17th at 2:30pm in person at the Bennett Library, SFU Burnaby, Room 7200, or online ( https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89946366405) for Dr. Tipei's talk titled “Greece: An Unintended Nation?”.

This talk will be moderated by Dr. Dimitris Krallis, Professor, Global Humanities.

Attendance is free. The event is open to the public and will be webcast and recorded.

This programming is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

ABSTRACT

At the start of the nineteenth century no country or administrative unit called Greece existed. When Grecophone intellectuals, French diplomats, or British businessmen wrote about Greece, they often referred more to an idea, with an inherently vague geography, than an actual place. When they put forth proposals for regime change in the region—replacing the Ottoman Porte with an Orthodox state—they generally spoke in terms of an empire spanning vast swaths of Southeast Europe and Anatolia. Yet, at the end of the Greek War of Independence, a small nation-state called Greece appeared on the map. Based on the recently published Unintended Nations: France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World (McGill-Queens, 2025), this talk traces out this history. It tracks how the unanticipated creation of a Greek state created a new form of legitimacy for the very idea of the nation in international politics. Situating these events in a continental and global context, the talk examines how French (informal) imperial ambitions and competition with Britain helped underwrite the establishment of Greece. It explores how these dynamics shaped notions of Greek identity and global civilizational, religious, and racial hierarchies.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

A transnational historian, primarily focused on Southeast Europe and France, Alex R. Tipei is a professor of history and international studies at the Université de Montréal. McGill-Queens University Press published her first monograph, Unintended Nations: France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World, in 2025. Her work has also appeared in Modern Intellectual History, European History Quarterly, and East European Politics and Societies among other outlets. Alex’s research has benefited from funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fulbright Program, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Before joining the faculty at UdeM, she held teaching and research positions at McGill and Princeton Universities as well as the Universities of Bucharest and Illinois. Alex is also a team leader on the European Research Council funded project Transnational Histories of Corruption in South-East-Central Europe based at New Europe College/Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest.

MODERATOR BIOGRAPHY

Dimitris Krallis was born in Athens where he lived during his childhood, teenage and college years. At the University of Athens he studied political theory and, inspired by his professors of history, decided to risk all by applying for a graduate degree in Byzantine Studies. This took him to the University of Oxford where he studied Byzantine social and political history. After an interruption of four years dedicated to military service and to teaching at the American College of Greece in Athens, he moved to the US and the University of Michigan for his doctorate. Upon graduation he joined the faculty at Simon Fraser University where he works at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies.

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