Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) is dedicated to supporting engagement with the ancient Greek world and its modern afterlives through research, education, and public humanities.
The CHS is based in both Washington, DC and Nafplio, Greece. It was founded in DC in 1960 through an endowment made “exclusively for the establishment of an educational center in the field of Hellenic Studies designed to rediscover the humanism of the Hellenic Greeks.”
At the heart of the campus in Washington, DC is the research library, which is home to about 75,000 books in ancient Greek studies and related fields. Scholars and students come to the Center from all over the world to use this premier research facility. The CHS hosts residential fellows, elected annually, who come to study and write within its unique research environment.
The Center in DC regularly holds talks, workshops, and conferences for scholars, teachers, and the general public, and offers a range of educational programs, such as a summer program for DMV-area high schoolers and research opportunities for Harvard students. We publish monographs and edited volumes, which are distributed in print through Harvard University Press and online in a free, open-access format. We also host various online resources, including translations of ancient Greek texts, the podcast Ancient Greece Today, and CHS Digital, a curated collection of IIIF manuscripts, papyri, maps, and rare books. These various initiatives are united by our goal to make cutting-edge research accessible to all.
Our campus in Nafplio, Greece was established in 2008. As one of Harvard’s global offices, CHS Greece is an interdisciplinary hub for the University abroad. It serves as a base of operations for scholars and students both from Harvard and from other academic institutions in the US, Greece, and beyond.
Virtual Tour
Take a virtual tour of the two-story main building of the Center!