I'm on the scholarly investigative case again, at the behest of my employer in Athens. This time I'm researching the life and works of one Aristides Evangelus Phoutrides, a professor of Modern Greek here at Harvard University during the latter half of the 19th and the early 20th Centuries. Not only did he publish his own works about Greek literature and translate Modern Greek writers into English, but Phoutrides was a poet as well, and wrote extensively on the outdoors, in particular the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It's possible that I might be able to give a paper on this guy in Greece next year, if I manage to discover enough about him; his collected papers are here at the Harvard Archives, so that's a huge start. This is exciting!

Astute readers of the Jersey Exile will recall that this isn't the first time that I've been digging up information on a Greek professor at Harvard. Last year I did some research on a fellow named E. A. Sophocles, who taught here in the 19th Century, and whose lexicon of Roman and Byzantine Greek (first published in 1870) is still the definitive reference text for that period of the Greek language. If this work on Phoutrides bears fruit, I might consider putting together a book on the Greeks at Harvard. Their story is an interesting one - it seems that after enjoying a very high profile in the field of Classics, philology, and literature in the 1800's, they dropped out of sight at the turn of the last century. My boss attempted a revival of sorts while he himself was at Harvard by establishing the Seferis Chair for Modern Greek Studies, but the latter-day Greek presence here is still uneven, and a mere shadow of what it apparently used to be.

At any rate, a lot of avenues to explore. Good thing the best collection in the world for such research is literally twenty steps away from me right now as I type. Just another reason why I'm loving the new job. Back at Countway I had to do all of this research utilizing the magic of Interlibrary Borrowing, which was okay while my old boss was calling the shots but something I knew I'd catch flak for as soon as the brownshirts who replaced her got wind of it. Never mind that Harvard is supposed to be facilitating the scholarly output of its faculty, students, and staff, and ensuring access to the library system's collections to that end. Something very perverse is going on over at the Medical School, because I see nothing but official and unofficial encouragement to take as much advantage of the libraries here in Cambridge as possible, not just from my coworkers and immediate supervisors but everyone all the way up the managerial ladder. I suspect the modern culture of American medicine, which is frighteningly classist and proudly anti-intellectual to boot. Oh, don't get me wrong, there are a few Renaissance men and women left in the field, and I was always thrilled to do some borrowing for our faculty in the School of Public Health, because their work was by its very nature cross-disciplinary; but by and large most of the HMS's rank and file wouldn't know a library if it came up and bit them in the ass.