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; and a D.Phil from Oxford in Modern and Medieval Languages, 1990.
Karen Van Dyck, Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature in the Classics Department at Columbia University, works on questions of translation, migration, gender and classical reception. She is the founding director of Hellenic Studies and 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 (Cornell, 1998), The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding (Wesleyan, 1998), The Scattered Papers of Penelope (Graywolf, 2010), The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (Norton, 2010), and Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (2016, Penguin). Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the LARB, the Paris Review, the PMLA, and World Literature Today.
Η Karen Van Dyck είναι καθηγήτρια νεοελληνικής λογοτεχνίας στο Τμήμα Κλασσικών Σπουδών στο Πανεπιστήμειο Κολούμπια στη Νέα Υόρκη. Έχει μεταφράσει και ανθολογήσει πολλούς έλληνες ποιητές. Στην Ελλάδα κυκλοφορούν τα ακόλουθα βιβλία της: η μετάφραση της Three Summers απο τα Ψάθινα καπέλα της Μαργαρίτας Λυμπεράκης (Κέδρος, 1995), η κριτική μελέτη Η Κασσάνδρα και οι λογοκριτές στη νεοελληνική ποίηση (Άγρα, 2002), η κριτική έκδοση Κατοχή και πείνα: Ιστορίες της κάθε μέρας της Ιουλία Περσάκη (Εστια, 2016) (με την Φαίη Ζήκα), η ανθολογία συγχρόνης ελληνικής ποιήσης Μέτρα λιτότητας (Άγρα, 2017) και μια δική της συλλογή ποίησης Αλλωνών / Lifted (Αγρα, 2022).
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.
Research Interests:
- Modern Greek Literature
- Women and Gender
- Translation and Reception
- Diaspora
