Further Information

The British School at Athens (BSA) seeks a part-time (0.4 FTE) Administrative Assistant based in our London office to work closely with staff based in Athens and London, including our Development Officer. 

The successful candidate will be expected to demonstrate through qualifications and experience the ability to undertake the following responsibilities: 

• The ability to work flexibly and effectively, both independently and as a member of a team.
• To provide secretarial and administrative support for the Chair of Council and other senior officers of the School as may be required.
• To run the London office, arranging office supplies and equipment maintenance, dealing with incoming correspondence and phone calls in a timely manner, responding to enquiries and referring them to colleagues as appropriate.
• To support the Development Officer in:
• maintaining records of the relevant supporters and contacts on eTapestry, and undertaking mailings as required.
• administering a programme of networking, social and educational events designed to engage subscribers, potential donors, alumni and friends of the School, and interested parties.
• the efficient production and mailing of the School’s various development publications.
• To have full responsibility for the organisation of the Annual Meeting of the School in London.
• To make practical arrangements for Council and Committee meetings as instructed by the Chair of Council, and by Committee Chairs and the Administrator; to act as Secretary to Council and to undertake follow-up tasks as agreed with the Administrator.
• To make practical arrangements and provide clerical support for those appointment committees which regularly meet in London and for such ad hoc appointment committees as may be established by Council.
• To organise distribution of the Trustees Report and newsletters.
• To liaise with the School’s bankers or any other advisors, to handle invoices or payments received in London appropriately and to maintain accurate and correct records of all financial transactions originating in the UK in collaboration with the Accountant.
• To support the Treasurer and Administrator to fulfill the requirements of the Charity Commission annual report.
• To provide administrative support to the UK Friends of the BSA.
• To undertake such occasional tasks as may from time to time be required by the Chair of Council, Treasurer, Director or School Administrator. 

Candidates will have at least a BA or BSc, ideally in a field of Hellenic Studies. Familiarity with donor management software (e.g. eTapestry) is desirable, but not essential. 

Salary will be £9,670 (0.4 FTE). The post is available immediately and will be subject to a probationary period of 6 months. The role will involve occasional travel in the UK and from time to time to Athens. Attendance at out of hours events is an occasional duty. The Administrative Assistant reports to the School Administrator.

Further information about the British School at Athens is given below and on www.bsa.ac.uk. Informal enquiries about the post may be addressed to the Chair of Council, Dr Carol Bell (carol.bell.pullan@btinternet.com), or the School Director, Professor John Bennet (director@bsa.ac.uk). Applicants will be expected to have some understanding of the UK and Greek contexts within which the School operates. 

Application:
Applications should be sent by email as a signed pdf attachment to the School Administrator, Mrs Tania Gerousi (school.administrator@bsa.ac.uk) by Friday 8 September 2017.

Applicants should supply the following:-

• A covering letter (of no more than two pages), giving the applicant’s contact details, outlining the reasons for applying, giving details of supporting enclosures, and summarising the applicant’s principal qualifications for the job;
• A curriculum vitae, giving details of past employment, academic and other qualifications and other relevant experience;
• The names, addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses of two referees, whom the candidate has contacted in advance and who have agreed to supply letters of reference sent directly to administrator@bsa.ac.uk by the closing date. 

The closing date for applications is Friday 8 September 2017. Interviews will be held in London as soon as practicable thereafter in September.

Further information about the British School at Athens
An educational charity founded in 1886, the British School at Athens (BSA) is the UK’s research hub in the humanities and social sciences in Greece and its wider Balkan, European, Mediterranean and Levantine contexts.  It conducts, facilitates and promotes research of international excellence in all periods – from the Palaeolithic to the present – and across all humanities and social science disciplines, as well as offering targeted courses to develop the next generation of researchers and academics in those fields.  Greece’s centrality in the history of the western tradition, combined with its key position in post-Ottoman southern Europe and on the front line of the current refugee crisis, make it an unusually rich location for research. 

The BSA forms part of the British Academy's network of British International Research Institutes (BIRI) which sustains and supports British research overseas. In Athens we support research in Greece and neighbouring countries as well as collaborations with local institutions. Our 130-year history brings a strong reputation, an unparalleled regional network, an accumulation of library and material resources, and a body of expertise that benefit both UK-based researchers and those who engage with us as research partners.  In the 2015-16 session, for example, over 400 researchers and almost 1,000 students used our facilities and the BSA collaborated with 28 UK universities and 43 institutions in Greece. 

The BSA’s goals are achieved through: 

• an academic programme of seminars, lectures, and conferences; 
• its internationally renowned library; 
• the work of the Fitch Laboratory in science-based archaeological research across the Mediterranean; 
• supporting the work of individual researchers from the UK and elsewhere, including applications for study and fieldwork permits; advice on the development of research programmes; accommodation and facilities in Athens and Knossos; and provision of online services; 
• making research carried out at the BSA or with its assistance known through the publication of its journals and monograph series; 
• promoting the use of its archival, laboratory, and museum collections by the scholarly community worldwide; 
• providing funding (including studentships and visiting fellowships) for research in Greece, and to enable Greek researchers to visit the UK; 
• providing internships and training courses for undergraduates, postgraduates, and schoolteachers. 

The School’s Annual Report 2015-2016, Corporate Plan and Strategic Plan for Research 2015-2020 are posted on www.bsa.ac.uk. 

Size and Scope
The School, founded in 1886, is an institute for advanced research and a registered UK charity (no. 208673). It maintains a hostel, world class library, archive, laboratory for archaeological science and offices in Athens; a smaller hostel, library and museum for study purposes in Knossos; and an office in London. It has five full-time academic staff (including the Knossos Curator), two research fellows, three full-time and two part-time administrative/secretarial staff, three full-time library/archival staff; and five full-time and two part-time domestic staff. The academic staff, the research fellows, the IT Officer, and the Archivist are all actively engaged in research, and all staff are actively encouraged to undertake professional development. In addition, the School is supported by research-active non-executive staff in the UK – in particular the Chair of Council (Dr Carol Bell) and the Deputy Honorary Treasurer (Huw Smith). Its turnover for the financial year 2015-16 was approximately 1.30m pounds. It offers two full studentships and several smaller bursaries for scholars every year. The School has just over 300 Basic subscribers and over 200 members, i.e. scholars or scientists who use its facilities for study purposes every year. In addition, around 1,000 researchers, who are not members, are given rights to use the library each year. 

Staffing
The School has the following research staff, details of whose research interests and publications are available on the School’s website (www.bsa.ac.uk):

Full-time academic staff: Professor John Bennet, Director; Dr Evangelia Kiriatzi, Director of the Fitch Laboratory; Dr Chryssanthi Papadopoulou, Assistant Director; Dr Noémi Müller, Scientific Research Officer; Dr Kostis Christakis, Knossos Curator.

Full-time research fellows: the Leventis Fellow, Dr Eirini Avramopoulou; the Williams Fellow in ceramic petrology, Dr John Gait.

Research-active staff with other primary responsibilities: Ms Amalia Kakissis, Archivist. 

Infrastructure and Facilities
The School’s principal research infrastructure consists of its Library, its Museum, its Fitch Laboratory and its facilities at Knossos. Most staff are based in Athens, but a London office is maintained in the British Academy (10-11 Carlton House Terrace, SW1Y 5AH), staffed by a part-time Administrative Assistant and a part-time Development Officer.

            The Library in Athens contains over 70,000 monographs, 1,300 periodical titles and 2,000 maps, and has space for 50 readers. It is staffed by two full-time librarians (Mrs Penny Wilson-Zarganis and Ms Sandra Pepelasis) with the help of a student library assistant. Members have 24-hour access. While providing a broad, research-level coverage of Greek archaeology of all periods, it specialises in the fields of Aegean prehistory, ancient art and epigraphy, and Byzantine and modern Greek studies; it also houses historical collections (such as George Finlay’s library) and a particularly good collection of Greek and Balkan journals. Its collections are complemented by those of the other foreign schools and institutes in Athens with whom we have reciprocal arrangements giving access to a unique collection of more than 450,000 titles on Hellenic Studies. We have particularly strong links with the neighbouring Blegen and Gennadius libraries of the American School, with whom we share a common online library catalogue (AMBROSIA, American British Online Search in Athens). 

            The School’s Archive collections contain records of the School’s field projects going back to 1886; material from the Byzantine Research Fund, ca 1895-1936 (ca. 6,500 unique plans, drawings and photographs of Byzantine architecture - some of buildings now destroyed); the George Finlay papers, including journals from the Greek War of Independence; travel notebooks (Gell, Stuart); ethnographic records and a large collection of glass negatives. Our archivist is responsible for access and conservation of the collection and has secured outside funding in support of projects to conserve, electronically catalogue and digitise images from selected collections.

            The Marc and Ismene Fitch Laboratory of Archaeological Science, founded in 1974, was the first of its kind in Greece.  It specialises principally in the analysis of inorganic materials (mainly pottery, as well as metals, wall paintings, glass) and in geophysical prospection, specialisms which are complementary to the neighbouring Wiener Laboratory of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. It maintains facilities for petrological analysis of pottery (facilities for thin section preparation and 3 research polarising microscopes coupled with digital photography system) and a WD-XRF spectrometer for chemical analysis. It houses comparative collections of over 10,000 archaeological samples and over 3,000 geological samples. For the needs of geophysical prospection it has a magnetometer and a resistivity meter. It also maintains reference collections of animal and fish bones as well as of seeds with ample space for strewing archaeological material, and offers annually two bursaries for graduate students or early-career postdocs and a visiting lectureship. It is staffed by its Director, a Scientific Research Officer, an administrator/analytical assistant, a research fellow, and visiting researchers or research associates linked to specific externally-funded projects. The Fitch plays a full part in the School’s postgraduate teaching activities, currently staging an annual short course on ceramic petrology.

Knossos has been a highly productive centre of research for the British School at Athens since 1900, when Sir Arthur Evans and David Hogarth, then School Director, began systematic excavations there. It remains a powerhouse of research, both in the field and in the study of excavated material, under the aegis of the BSA. The Knossos Research Centre is focused upon the Stratigraphical Museum (a study centre and finds archive for all British fieldwork at Knossos since the time of Evans, and for several other School projects focused elsewhere in Crete) and has a self-catering hostel (the Taverna) and library, open year-round.  The Library has a good collection of books and offprints (especially about Crete), and full access to e-resources via AMBROSIA.  The Library is also used by local researchers, members of the Archaeological Service, the University of Crete, and other institutions. The Taverna, which has 10 beds, serves principally as a base for those studying in the Stratigraphical Museum or the Herakleion Museum.  Knossos is fully integrated into the School’s ICT network.  There is a resident Curator and a small domestic staff.

In addition, the School’s administrative and academic staff (principally the Administrator) makes use of the School’s wide-ranging connections to help individual scholars with permit applications. 

Dissemination and Publication of Research
The BSA maintains a policy of publishing the results of its own research, particularly in the fields of archaeology, epigraphy and history. The School’s Annual (running since 1895 and published by CUP) is devoted to publishing research in all areas of the School’s broad scope, including work carried out by by its officers and other members. The School also compiles annually in collaboration with the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies Archaeology in Greece, a collection of synthetic articles on recent archaeological fieldwork in Greece which draws on Archaeology in Greece Online, a regularly updated compilation of fieldwork reports produced in collaboration with the École française d’Athènes. Final reports on major excavation or survey projects usually appear in the School’s Supplementary Volumes, while other collections are published in two series: BSA Studies in Greek Antiquity (CUP) and BSA Studies in Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies (Routledge). The School recognises its role in conserving and facilitating access to the archives (in all media) produced by major excavations, surveys or other studies. To this end we are active in cataloguing and digitizing our archive, and in making it available via the School website.