byzantine - Christou, Theodore

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Résumé :
byzantine proceeds through shallow breaths and heavy swells. Individual poems change their tenor, their voice, their perspective, and their concerns even as the collection builds a continuity of experiences and reflections on various contexts, historical and contemporary, and perspectives or voices. The collection oversees at least three generations: poet, father, grandfather. It moves from Canada to Cyprus. It heaves through academic prose and notes and it flits through soft reflections. This book is Greek and English. Historical and modern. Coy, sad, and ideological. The collection merits reading from front to back. It is something like a novel, deconstructed with respect to character, setting, and plot. Yet the title reveals a great deal about its content. Byzantium is an enigma, as characterized popularly, when it is regarded at all. Put simply, it was the continuation of the Roman Empire post its move to Constantinople from Rome and post its Christianization in the fourth century. Intricate court life. Mystical hierarchies and structures. Decline and fall. Byzantium is a space remember largely through negative connotation in the western world and through mythologizing and memory in the eastern world. Byzantium is a space of historical lore, spiritual exercise and patience, and intellectual efflorescence. The poet standing at his window could very well be overlooking the Bosphorus in contemporary Istanbul. He looks at the world around him, the world past, and the world he could only imagine through stories, and weaves his tale accordingly.

Biographie:
Theodore Michael Christou is an Associate Professor of Social Studies and History Education, with a cross appointment to the Department of History in Queen's University's Faculty of Arts and Science. He began his professional teaching career as an elementary school teacher in Scarborough with the Toronto District School Board. Following a circuitous path, Theodore returned to the academy to pursue doctoral studies in history of education. Dr. Christou commenced his academic course on the tenure track in Fredericton at the University of New Brunswick in 2009. In July 2012, that course led westwards, back to Kingston, Ontario, and to Queen's University. Dr. Christou's teaching at Queen's extends to several disciplines; in particular, he concentrates upon history of education, philosophy of education, social studies, and the theory and practice of history. His research, which spans several fields - history, philosophy, curriculum, and teacher education - is tied together by two questions: a) What is an education for?, and b) How might we imagine an education individual? These questions are bound by historical, as well as contemporary, context and complexities. Theodore has written academic articles and books, school textbooks, and he has edited numerous scholarly collections and refereed journals. To breathe, he writes poetry, probing self in relation to the other and ersonal history, mundane and meandering.