Fall 2024 Course Offerings

Hellenism and the Topographical Imagination, Dimitrios Antoniou
GRKM UN3935 - 3 Points Global Core
Th 12:10-2:00 PM
This course examines the way particular spaces—cultural, urban, literary—serve as sites for the production and reproduction of cultural and political imaginaries. It places particular emphasis on the themes of the polis, the city, and the nation-state as well as on spatial representations of and responses to notions of the Hellenic across time. Students will consider a wide range of texts as spaces—complex sites constituted and complicated by a multiplicity of languages—and ask: To what extent is meaning and cultural identity, site specific? How central is the classical past in Western imagination? How have great metropolises such as Paris, Istanbul, and New York fashioned themselves in response to the allure of the classical and the advent of modern Greece? How has Greece as a specific site shaped the study of the Cold War, dictatorships, and crisis?

Retranslation: Worlding C.P. Cavafy, Karen Van Dyck
CLGM4300GU / CLGM4300W - 4 Points Cross-listed with ICLS
M 12:10-2:00 PM
Focusing on a canonical author is an immensely productive way to explore translation research and practice. The works of Sappho, Dante, Rilke, Césaire or Cavafy raise the question of reception in relation to many different critical approaches and illustrate many different strategies of translation and adaptation. The very issue of intertextuality, that challenged the validity of author-centered courses after Roland Barthes’s proclamation of the death of the author, reinstates it, if we are willing to engage the oeuvre as an on-going interpretive project. By examining the poetry of the Greek Diaspora poet C. P. Cavafy in all its permutations (as criticism, translation, adaptation), the Cavafy case becomes an experimental ground for thinking about how a canonical author can open up our theories and practices of translation. For the final project students will choose a work by an author with a considerable body of critical work and translations and, following the example of Cavafy and his translators, come up with their own retranslations. Among the materials considered are commentary by E. M. Forster, C. M. Bowra, and Roman Jakobson, translations by Rae Dalven, James Merrill, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Daniel Mendelsohn, poems by W.H. Auden, Lawrence Durrell, and Joseph Brodsky, and visual art by David Hockney, and Duane Michals.

Thessaloniki Down the Ages, Paraskevi Martzavou
CSGM UN3567 - 3 Points Global Core
W 4:10-6:00 PM
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 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].

Mental health in Literature from Antiquity to Futurity, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa
CLGM UN3650 - 3 Points Cross-listed with ICLS and ISSG
T 2:10-4:00 PM
This seminar explores the relationship between literature, culture, and mental health. It pays particular emphasis to the poetics of emotions structuring them around the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and the concept of hope. During the course of the semester, we will discuss a variety of content that explores issues of race, socioeconomic status, political beliefs, abilities/disabilities, gender expressions, sexualities, and stages of life as they are connected to mental illness and healing. Emotions are anchored in the physical body through the way in which our bodily sensors help us understand the reality that we live in. By feeling backwards and thinking forwards, we will ask a number of important questions relating to literature and mental health, and will trace how human experiences are first made into language, then into science, and finally into action.

Nationalism in Theory and History, Konstantina Zanou
CLIA UN3024 - 3 Points
M 10:00-12:00 PM
Were nations always there? Are they real or imagined? Do they come before or after nationalism and the state? How did we pass from a world of empires, duchies, and city-states to a world of nation-states? Where does legitimacy reside if not in God and his endowed kings? Is the modern world really ‘disenchanted’? How did we come to understand time, space, language, religion, gender, race, and even our very selves in the era of nations? Are we done with this era, living already in postnational times? This course will combine older theories of nationalism (Gellner, Anderson, Hobsbawm, Smith) with recent approaches of the phenomenon after then ‘Imperial/Global/Transnational Turn’ and late studies in Gender, Race, Culture and Nationalism, in order to offer new answers to old questions. We will talk about many places around the world, but the main stage where we will try out our questions is Italy and the Mediterranean.

Supervised Independent Research, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa GRKM GU4460 01

Supervised Independent Research, Stathis Gourgouris GRKM GU4460 02

Supervised Independent Research, Dimitris Antoniou GRKM GU4460 03

Supervised Independent Research, Karen Van Dyck GRKM GU4460 04

Supervised Independent Research, Paraskevi Martzavou GRKM GU4460 05

Directed Readings, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa GRKM UN3997 01

Directed Readings, Stathis Gourgouris GRKM UN3997 02

Directed Readings, Dimitris Antoniou GRKM UN3997 03

Directed Readings, Karen Van Dyck GRKM UN3997 04

Directed Readings, Paraskevi Martzavou GRKM UN3997 05

Senior Research Seminar, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa GRKM UN3998