Papers of Amy Mims, 1954-2010

Amy Mims, writer and prize-winning translator of Modern Greek literature, studied Ancient Greek literature and history at Radcliffe College and graduated in 1957. She was the winner of the Fay prize and awarded a Marshall scholarship for post-graduate study in Oxford. After completing her Oxford degree in Byzantine and Modern Greek literature she moved to Greece and married a prominent artist. Their daughter was born in 1962. Driven from Greece by the rule of the Junta (1967-1974), Amy Mims took refuge in England and in Cyprus. With assistance from Professor John Finley and Radcliffe, she received an American Association of University Women fellowship (1969-1970). Her translations include the works of Nikos Kazantzakis, Yannis Ritsos, and many other Modern Greek playwrights and poets. She has received grants from the British Centre for Literary Translation in Norwich, England, Literary Centers in Greece and Sweden, as well as Princeton’s Program for Hellenic Studies, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland.

Helen Sullivan (1906-1992), historian and sociologist, was a professor of European history and the mother of Amy Mims. She was born to an Irish Catholic family in upstate New York. She graduated from Cornell University and worked for the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences where she met and married political scientist Edwin Mims. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to research the history of 16th century Castile and spent 1935-1936 in Madrid and Paris. The family settled in Cambridge, Mass., where Edwin Mims taught in the government department at Harvard University. After their divorce, Helen Sullivan taught sociology at Smith College (1944-1947) and then European history at the University of Chicago. Research leave in Paris was followed by a term at Radcliffe as Visiting Research Fellow (1952) where she continued to prepare a book about 16th century European history, comparing English and Spanish political and economic history, for publication. Her work, entitled The Communal Mind and the Master Artifice, was published in Greece in 2009-2010 (ISBN: 978-960-303-172-7) and will be published as an e-book in 2013 (ISBN: 978-0927379-92-2).