Karen Van Dyck

Faculty

Karen Van Dyck received a B.A. from Wesleyan in Classics and the College of Letters, 1983, a M.A. from Aristotle in Classics and Modern Greek, 1985; a D.Phil from Oxford in Modern and Medieval Liturature, 1990.

Karen Van Dyck, Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature in the Classics Department, works on questions of translation, migration, gender and classical reception. She is the founder and former director of Hellenic Studies (1988-2016) and has also been an active member of the Institute for Research on Women, Sexuality and Gender, the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society, the European Institute and the Istanbul and Athens Global Centers. Her books and translations include Kassandra and the Censors, The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding, The Scattered Papers of Penelope, Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry, and Margarita Liberaki's Three Summers. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the LARB, the Paris Review, the PMLA, The Translator and World Literature Today. Her forthcoming book Translingual Worlds: Diaspora, Translation and the Greeks explores how the movement between places maps onto the movement between languages in literature and translations by and about the Greek Diaspora since the 1880s.

Here are some videos that the poets involved with her anthology, Austerity Measures, created, and here is an interview about the Greek edition of the anthology. Here is a piece about her translation of Margarita Liberaki's Three Summers (NYRB, 2019), reissued in the Penguin European Classics (2021). Her honorary doctorate speech on translation and migration at the University of Athens on March 23, 2022, can be found here. She recently published Lifted, a bilingual collection of poetry that explores the ethics of making poems out of other people’s prose and translations as it tells the story of a girl becoming a writer and translator (Agra, 2022, trans. Eleni Bourou). You can find videos of the book launches in NYC here and in Athens here.