Location: GISB 2067

Lunch will be provided!

This talk will focus on a rare discussion of tobacco in Ottoman Greek culture, which presents us with a number of questions that are as inevitable as they are elusive. What was at stake in a debate that produced works offering either a generous defense or a scathing reproof of smoking and its enthusiasts? Who were the people involved and what was their interest in the topic? What were their means of engagement, where did their arguments come from, was there an agenda that drove their approach? Did they have a specific audience in mind? Were they responding to things or catering to needs that call for an explanation? The proposed answers might not be what one would expect today when smoking is generally treated as something that does not lend itself to play.

Nikos Panou is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Peter V. Tsantes Endowed Professor in Hellenic Studies at Stony Brook University. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies and the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Princeton University. Before moving to Stony Brook he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. His current research focuses on the ways power and authority were conceptualized and represented in pre-modern philosophical discourse, with a particular emphasis on moral and political works written from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

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