After the Postwar World: Anniversaries, Generations and the Memory of 1945

By Mark A. Mazower
Ira D. Wallach Professor of History
Columbia University

Introductory remarks
Haris Vlavianos
Chief Consultant and Head of the Advisory Board
Institute for Hellenic Culture and the Liberal Arts (IHCLA)
The American College of Greece

When: Thursday, November 13, 2025 | 19:00
Where: ACG Events Hall
The American College of Greece 6 Gravias str., Agia Paraskevi 9 (parking upon availability)

About the lecture

This year marked the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, an anniversary remarkable chiefly for the lack of attention it attracted. This lecture asks what has happened to the idea that we live in a postwar world, and explores the origins of our politics of collective memory in the rituals that sprang up after the First World War, rituals that were accompanied by the first serious reflection on the nature of collective memory itself. As collective memories become public, they also become more fragile and more instrumental. Today the obligation to remember is a commonplace of political life and as liable to critique as all other political strategies.

The lecture is free & open to the public. A reception will follow.

About the lecturer

Mark Mazower, Ira D. Wallach Professor of History, was educated at Oxford University and Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in modern Greece, 20th-century Europe, and international history. He comments on international affairs and reviews books for the Financial Times, the Nation, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and others. Among his most recent books are The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (2021) which won the Duff Cooper Prize; What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home (Other Press, 2017), a family history and this year On Antisemitism: A Word in History. He is also the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Director of the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, which brings together scholars and artists, writers, composers and film-makers from around the world. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the British Academy.

For more information, please contact [email protected]