Episode 1: Professor Alain Bresson
Prof. Bresson served as the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor emeritus in the Departments of Classics and History, in the Oriental Institute, and in the College. His research focuses on the ancient economy, with a current concentration in money and credit, questions on which he has already published extensively and on which he is preparing a new book. He also publishes regularly on the history, epigraphy and numismatics of various regions of the ancient world, especially Asia Minor. In collaboration with Askold Ivantchik he is preparing a new corpus of the inscriptions of Phrygian Apameia. He chaired the Department of Classics from July 1st, 2011, to June 30, 2014.
Episode 2: Professor Anastasia Giannakidou
Dr. Anastasia Giannakidou is a Professor of Linguistics and the College at the University of Chicago. She studied Classical Philology and Linguistics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, and received her PhD in Linguistics from University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She is one of the founders and the director of the newly established Hellenic Studies Center at the University of Chicago. She is also a co-director of the Center for Gesture, Sign and Language, and a collaborator in the Bilingualism Matters initiative in Chicago. Anastasia’s main interests are on linguistic meaning, the relation between meaning and form, and how language is used to convey subjectivity, including ideology.
Prof. Giannakidou is particularly interested in studying variation and diversity across languages. Her main language of study is Modern Greek; and she has done comparative work on German, Dutch, Spanish, Basque, Korean, and Mandarin Chinese, and has worked on diachronic syntax and semantics. She is the author of numerous articles and books including Polarity Sensitivity as Nonveridical Dependency, Definiteness and Nominalization, Mood, Tense, Aspect revisited. Anastasia is presently working on a book entitled Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought, forthcoming with University of Chicago Press.