Spring 2022 Course Offerings

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Elementary Modern Greek II, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa
GRKM UN1102
MW 12.10pm-2pm

A continuation of UN1101, the students are expected to be able to read texts containing high frequency vocabulary and basic structures; understand basic conversations or understand the gist of more complex conversations on familiar topics; produce simple speech on familiar topics; communicate in simple tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange of information on familiar and routine matters; write short texts or letters on familiar subjects.

Intermediate Modern Greek II, Chrysanthe Filippardos
GRKM UN2101
MW 6.10pm-8.00pm

A continuation of UN2101, upon completion of the course, the students are able to read simple Greek newspaper articles, essays and short stories and to express their opinion on a number of familiar topics. In addition to these skills, students will be exposed to a number of authentic multimodal cultural material that will allow them to acquire knowledge and understanding of the vibrant cultural landscape of Greece today.

Mental health in Literature from Antiquity to Futurity, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa 
CLGM UN3650, cross-listed with ICLS  and ISSG
M, 4.10pm-6.00pm

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.

The course surveys texts from Homer, Ovid, Aeschylus and Sophocles to Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, C.P. Cavafy, Dinos Christianopoulos, Margarita Karapanou, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Katerina Gogou etc., and the work of artists such as Toshio Matsumoto, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Anohni.

Politics of Violence: Conflict, Borders, and the Carceral State, Katerina Stefatos
CLGM UN3700
T, 2.10pm-4.00pm


Politics of Violence offers an analysis of the role of the state, its mechanisms, and its structures in perpetuating, legitimizing, and facilitating political, racial and gender based violence worldwide. We will explore the connections and effects of nationalism, militarism, and heteropatriarchy (as structural and ideological elements of the state) as well as neoliberal assaults and practices in the normalization of violence against dissidents, incarcerated populations, refugees, workers, and indigenous communities. We will engage in a theoretical discussion on the salience of particular ideational and material experiences of race, ethnicity, indigeneity, gender and queer identities, political affiliation, in rendering state sponsored, political violence, and torture thinkable.
 
The course aims to shed light on the power structures within militaristic and hypermasculinized state frameworks, and on biopolitical practices that legitimize structural violence against particular communities based on their political, class, gender, ethnic identities or precarious immigration status. In this seminar, we will examine violence, persecution, and dispossession as inherent phenomena of the sovereign nation state, in their continuities and ruptures, during war and conflict, but also in migratory, democratic, and transitional contexts.
 
Students will examine historical and contemporary cases of state sponsored and political violence, systematic violations of human rights in the context of genocide, gendercide, racist violence, colonial terrorism, carceral regimes, and the securitization of forced migration. Lectures and readings provide a comparative, transnational perspective but focus on regional case studies,  through a transdisciplinary lens, drawing on international relations, anthropology, gender studies, political theory, and history. 
 

The Culture of Democracy, Stathis Gourgouris
CLGM UN3937, cross-listed with ICLS
W, 2:10pm-4:00pm

The point is to examine democracy not as a political system, but as a historical phenomenon characterized by a specific culture: a body of ideas and values, stories and myths. This culture is not homogenous; it has a variety of historical manifestations through the ages but remains nonetheless cohesive. The objective is twofold: 1) to determine which elements in democratic culture remain fundamental, no matter what form they take in various historical instances; 2) to understand that the culture of democracy is indeed not abstract and transcendental but historical, with its central impetus being the interrogation and transformation of society. Special emphasis will be placed on the crisis of democratic institutions in the era of globalization and, as specific case-study in point, the democratic failure in the Mediterranean region in light of the challenges of the assembly movements (Spain, Greece, Arab Spring) and the current migrant/refugee crisis.

Retranslation: Worlding C. P. Cavafy, Karen Van Dyck
CLMG W4300, cross-listed with ICLS
T, 6.10pm-8.00pm

By examining the poetry of the Greek Diaspora poet C. P. Cavafy in all its permutations, the case of a canonical author becomes experimental ground for opening up theories and practices of translation and world literature. Students will choose a group of poems by Cavafy or a work by another 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 (whether queer, visual, archival, theatrical). Focus on a canonical author can be a productive way to explore translation research and practice and its implications for world literature. The works of authors from Homer and Sappho to Césaire and Cavafy raise the question of reception in relation to different critical approaches and illustrate different strategies of translation and adaptation. The very issue of intertextuality that prompted Roland Barthes’s proclamation of "the death of the author" reinstates the possibility of an author-centered course if we engage an oeuvre as an on-going interpretive project of “worlding” through criticism, translation and adaptation. Works read include commentary by E. M. Forster, C. M. Bowra, and Roman Jakobson, translations by 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.

Directed Readings, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa
GRKM UN3997 01
Directed Readings, Karen Van Dyck
GRKM UN3997 03
Directed Readings, Stathis Gourgouris
GRKM UN3997 04
Directed Readings, Paraskevi Martzavou
GRKM UN3997 05
Senior Research Seminar
GRKM UN3998 01
Supervised Independent Research, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa
GRKM GU4460 01
Supervised Independent Research, Karen Van Dyck
GRKM GU4460 03
Supervised Independent Research, Stathis Gourgouris
GRKM GU4460 04
Supervised Independent Research, Paraskevi Martzavou
GRKM GU4460 05