Fall 2022 Course Offerings
For Fall 2022 course offerings click HERE.
Elementary Modern Greek I, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa
GRKM UN1101
M/W, 12:10pm-2:00pm
This is the first semester of a year-long course designed for students wishing to learn
Greek as it is written and spoken in Greece today. As well as learning the skills
necessary to read texts of moderate difficulty and converse on a wide range of
topics, students explore Modern Greece's cultural landscape from "parea" to poetry
to politics. Special attention will be paid to Greek New York. How do
"our", "American", "Greek-American" definitions of language and
culture differ from "their", "Greek" ones?
Intermediate Modern Greek I, Chrysanthe Filippardos
GRKM UN2101
M/W, 6:10pm-8:00pm
This course is designed for students who are already familiar with the basic grammar and
syntax of modern Greek language and can communicate at an
elementary level. Using films, newspapers, and popular songs, students
engage the finer points of Greek grammar and syntax and enrich their
vocabulary. Emphasis is given to writing, whether in the form of film and book
reviews or essays on particular topics taken from a selection of second-year
textbooks.
Dictatorships and their Afterlives, Dimitris Antoniou
CLGM UN3005
T, 12:10pm-2:00pm
What does the investigation of a dictatorship entail and what are the challenges in
such an endeavor? Why (and when) do particular societies turn to an examination of
their non-democratic pasts? What does it mean for those who never experienced an
authoritarian regime first-hand to remember it through television footage, popular
culture, and family stories? This seminar examines dictatorships and the ways in which
they are remembered, discussed, examined, and give rise to conflicting narratives in
post-dictatorial environments. It takes as its point of departure the Greek military regime
of 1967-1974, which is considered in relation to other dictatorships in South
America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. We will be drawing on primary materials including
Amnesty International reports, film, performance art, and architectural drawings as
well as the works of Hannah Arendt and Günter Grass to engage in an
interdisciplinary examination of the ways in which military dictatorships live on as
ghosts, traumatic memories, urban warfare, litigation, and debates on the politics of
comparison and the ethics of contemporary art.
How to do things with Queer Βodies, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa
CLGM UN3450
T, 2.10pm-4pm
Homosexuality, as a term, might be a relatively recent invention in Western culture (1891) but bodies
that acted and appeared queer(ly) existed long before that. This course will focus on acts, and
not identities, in tracing the evolution of writing the queer body from antiquity until today. In doing
so it will explore a number of multimodal materials – texts, vases, sculptures, paintings,
photographs, movies etc. – in an effort to understand the evolution of the ways in which language
(written, spoken or visual) registers these bodies in literature and culture. When we bring the
dimension of the body into the way we view the past, we find that new questions and new ways of
approaching old questions emerge. What did the ancient actually write about the male/female/
trans* (homo)sexual body? Did they actually create gender non-binary statues? Can we find
biographies of the lives of saints in drag in Byzantium? How did the Victorians change the way in
which we read Antiquity? How is the queer body registered in Contemporary Literature and
Culture? Can one write the history of homosexuality as a history of bodies? How are queer bodies
constructed and erased by scholars? How can we disturb national archives by globalizing the queer
canon of bodies through translation? These are some of the questions that we will examine during the semester. The course surveys texts from Homer, Sappho, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, Theocritus, Ovid, Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symonds, Dinos Christianopoulos, Audre Lorde, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner etc., the work of artists such as Yiannis Tsarouchis, Robert Mapplethorpe, Dimitris Papaioannou, Cassils, movies such as 120 battements par minute, and popular TV shows such as Pose. No knowledge of Greek (ancient / modern) or Latin is required.
Thessaloniki Down the Ages, Paraskevi Martzavou
CSGM UN3567
W, 4:10pm-6:00pm
This course will explore the fascinatingly layered and multicultural history of Thessaloniki, the great
city of Northern Greece and the Balkans. We will examine texts, archaeological evidence, literature,
songs, and movies and in general the materialities of the city. We will examine this material from the
6th century BCE down to the the 21st cent. CE. We will notably think about the problems of history,
identity, and cultural interaction in reaction to recent work such as Mark Mazower’s well known
Salonica, City of Ghosts [2004]. This course fulfills the global core requirement.
Directed Readings, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa
GRKM UN3997 01
Directed Readings, Dimitris Antoniou
GRKM UN3997 02
Directed Readings, Paraskevi Martzavou
GRKM UN3997 05
Senior Research Seminar, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa
GRKM UN3998
Supervised Independent Research, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa
GRKM GU4460 01
Supervised Independent Research, Dimitris Antoniou
GRKM GU4460 02
Supervised Independent Research, Paraskevi Martzavou
GRKM GU4460 05