Classics

LATN UN1101 ELEMENTARY LATIN I. 4.00 points.

For students who have never studied Latin. An intensive study of grammar with reading of simple prose and poetry

LATN UN1102 ELEMENTARY LATIN II. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: LATN V1101.
Prerequisites: LATN UN1101. A continuation of LATN UN1101, including a review of grammar and syntax for students whose study of Latin has been interrupted

LATN UN1121 INTENSIVE ELEMENTARY LATIN. 4.00 points.

LATN UN2101 INTERMEDIATE LATIN I. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: LATN V1101-V1102, or LATN V1121, or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: LATN UN1101 ＆ UN1102 or LATN UN1121 or equivalent. Selections from Catullus and Cicero

LATN UN2102 INTERMEDIATE LATIN II. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: LATN V1201 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: LATN UN2101 or the equivalent. Selections from Ovids Metamorphoses and from Sallust, Livy, Seneca, or Pliny

LATN UN3012 AUGUSTAN POETRY. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: LATN V1202 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: LATN UN2102 or the equivalent. Selections from Vergil and Horace. Combines literary analysis with work in grammar and metrics

LATN UN3013 CLASSICAL LATIN PROSE. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: LATN W2202 or equivalent This course is intended to complement Latin V3012: Augustan Poetry in providing students I a transition between the elementary, grammatical study of Latin texts to a more fluent understanding of complex literary style. Latin V3013 will largely concentrate on different styles of writing, particularly narrative, invective, and argument. Text will be drawn primarily from Ciceros orations, with some readings form his rhetorical works

LATN UN3033 MEDIEVAL LANGUAGE ＆ LITERATURE. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: four semesters of college Latin or the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: four semesters of college Latin or the instructors permission. This course offers an introduction to medieval Latin literature in conversation with its two most important traditions, classical literature and early Christian culture. Illustrative passages from the principal authors and genres of the Latin Middle Ages will be read, including Augustine and biblical exegesis; Ambrose and poetry; Bede and history and hagiography; Abelard and Heloise and the 12th century Renaissance. The course is suitable both for students of Latin and of the Middle Ages

LATN UN3035 Poetry as Neurosis: Lucan’s Bellum Civile. 3 points.

This course is an intensive study of Lucan’s revolutionary and enigmatic Bellum Civile, the epic masterpiece of the Neronian age, which was admired and imitated all through the history of Western culture by authors such as Dante, Montaigne, Milton, Voltaire, Goethe, Shelley, and Baudelaire among others. The course will examine major controversies concerning the form and meaning of the poem, with special emphasis on the poetic tension created by the narrator’s neurotic personality. The narration of the 49 BCE civil war between Caesar and Pompey is for Lucan the pretext for an original and intensely personal reflection on themes such as political oppression, the role of the individual in society, nihilism, self-destructiveness, mental disorder, and artistic creation. The poem will be analyzed from various critical perspectives that include rhetoric, intertextuality, deconstruction, reception theory, and psychoanalysis; no previous knowledge of any of these methodologies is required. Although an acceptable knowledge of Latin (intermediate or above) is assumed, the primary focus of this course is literary and sociological interpretation rather than linguistic competence. In addition to the Latin reading assignments, the poem will also be read entirely in English translation, allowing students to comprehend the whole while they engage with particular sections in the original language. The assignment for each class will include: (1) approximately five hundred lines to be read in English translation; (2) translation of short Latin passages, whose size may be adapted to the level of the class/student; (3) secondary readings.

LATN UN3309 LATIN LITERATURE SELECTIONS. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: LATN V1202 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: LATN UN2102 or the equivalent. Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit

LATN UN3310 LATIN LITERATURE SELECTIONS. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: LATN V1202 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: LATN UN2102 or the equivalent. Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit

LATN UN3320 Intensive Reading Course. 3 points.

This course is limited to students in the Postbaccalaureate program. The intensive reading of a series of Latin texts, both prose and verse, with special emphasis on detailed stylistic and grammatical analysis of the language.

LATN UN3980 POST-BACCALAUREATE SEMINAR. 3.00 points.

This seminar aims to provide students in the post-baccalaureate certificate program with opportunities 1) to (re-)familiarize themselves with a selection of major texts from classical antiquity, which will be read in English, 2) to become acquainted with scholarship on these texts and with scholarly writing in general, 3) to write analytically about these texts and the interpretations posed about them in contemporary scholarship, and 4) to read in the original language selected passages of one of the texts in small tutorial groups, which will meet every week for an additional hour with members of the faculty

LATN UN3996 THE MAJOR SEMINAR. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: junior standing. Required for all majors in Classics and Classical Studies. The topic changes from year to year but is always broad enough to accommodate students in the languages as well as those in the interdisciplinary major. Past topics include: love, dining, slavery, space, power

LATN UN3997 DIRECTED READINGS IN LATIN LIT. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of reading in Latin literature, to be tested by a series of short papers, one long paper, or an oral or written examination

LATN UN3998 SUPERVISED RSRCH IN LATIN LIT. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of research in Latin literature. Research paper required

LATN GU4010 SELECTIONS FROM LATIN LITERATURE. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: LATN UN3012 LATN V3012 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: LATN UN3012 or the equivalent. Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit

LATN GU4105 LAT LITERATURE OF THE REPUBLIC. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: at least two terms of Latin at the 3000-level or higher. Latin literature from the beginning to early Augustan times

LATN GU4106 HISTORY OF LATIN LIT II. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: at least two terms of Latin at the 3000-level or higher.
Prerequisites: at least two terms of Latin at the 3000-level or higher. Latin literature from Augustus to 600 C.E

LATN GU4152 MEDIEVAL LATIN LITERATURE. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. This course covers various topics in Medieval Latin Literature

LATN GR5139 ELEMENTS LATIN PROSE STYLE. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: at least four semesters of Latin, or the equivalent. Intensive review of Latin syntax with translation of English sentences and paragraphs into Latin

GREK UN1101 ELEMENTARY GREEK I. 4.00 points.

For students who have never studied Greek. An intensive study of grammar with reading and writing of simple Attic prose

GREK UN1102 ELEMENTARY GREEK II. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: GREK V1101 or the equivalent, or the instructor or the director of undergraduate studies' permission.
Prerequisites: GREK UN1101 or the equivalent, or the instructor or the director of undergraduate studies permission. Continuation of grammar study begun in GREK UN1101; selections from Attic prose

GREK UN1121 INTENSIVE ELEMENTARY GREEK. 4.00 points.

Covers all of Greek grammar and syntax in one term. Prepares the student to enter second-year Greek (GREK UN2101 or GREK UN2102)

GREK UN2101 INTERMEDIATE GREEK: PROSE. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: GREK V1101-1102 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: GREK UN1101- GREK UN1102 or the equivalent. Selections from Attic prose

GREK UN2102 INTERMEDIATE GREEK II: HOMER. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: GREK V1101-V1102 or GREK V1121 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: GREK UN1101- GREK UN1102 or GREK UN1121 or the equivalent. Detailed grammatical and literary study of several books of the Iliad and introduction to the techniques or oral poetry, to the Homeric hexameter, and to the historical background of Homer

GREK UN3016 Readings from the Greek New Testament. 3.00 points.

The New Testament introduces us to a register, or rather registers, of Greek radically unlike those of the high canon of classical texts. In broad terms, all the texts in the collection possess features that link them to the documentary Greek used in early imperial papyri and inscriptions, for example, the obsolescence of the optative, the infrequency of certain particles, and the relative simplicity of the syntax. But there is remarkable variety within these broad constraints: Matthew straightforwardly imitates the language of the Greek Old Testament, Markan prose is pared down to the point of being gnomic, Luke/Acts has some generic markers of historiography without any meaningful indication that the classical historians served the author as a model, and the lively paraenetic/argumentative/hysterical style of the authentic Pauline Epistles resists facile classification. The existence of such texts reminds us of the need to break out of the Atticistic canon if we want to get a full picture of Imperial Greek. We need to determine who in socio-economic terms the writers and readers of such texts may have been and whether there may not have been many more like them. In this way we can complicate the facile view that draws an excessively close connection between the eastern Empire, Greekness and the Greek city, and the Second Sophistic. Not all Greek writing was a vehicle for the dissemination of an exclusivistic Greekness. It will also not be ignored that these texts are important not only for literary scholars and Roman social historians, but also for historians of Christianity and Judaism, for reasons too obvious to require explication. But no texts analyze themselves: students will be introduced to the central problems raised by the texts and the main methodological and theoretical approaches used to solve them

GREK UN3309 SELECTIONS FROM GREEK LIT. 3.00 points.

Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit

GREK UN3310 GREEK LITERATURE SELECTIONS II. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: GREK V1201-V1202 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: GREK UN2101 - GREK UN2102 or the equivalent. Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit

GREK UN3980 POST-BACCALAUREATE SEMINAR. 3.00 points.

This seminar aims to provide students in the post-baccalaureate certificate program with opportunities 1) to (re-)familiarize themselves with a selection of major texts from classical antiquity, which will be read in English, 2) to become acquainted with scholarship on these texts and with scholarly writing in general, 3) to write analytically about these texts and the interpretations posed about them in contemporary scholarship, and 4) to read in the original language selected passages of one of the texts in small tutorial groups, which will meet every week for an additional hour with members of the faculty

GREK UN3996 THE MAJOR SEMINAR. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: junior standing. Required for all majors in classics and classical studies. The topic changes from year to year, but is always broad enough to accommodate students in the languages as well as those in the interdisciplinary major. Past topics include: love, dining, slavery, space, power

GREK UN3997 DIRECTED READINGS IN GREEK LIT. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of reading in Greek literature, to be tested by a series of short papers, one long paper, or an oral or written examination

GREK UN3998 SUPERVISED RSRCH IN GREEK LIT. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of research in Greek literature. Research paper required

GREK GU4009 SELECTNS FROM GREEK LIT. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: GREK V1201 and V1202, or their equivalent. Since the content of the course changes from year to year, it may be taken in consecutive years

GREK GU4010 SELECTIONS FROM GREEK LIT. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: GREK V1201-V1202 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: GREK UN2101 - GREK UN2102 or the equivalent. Since the content of this course changes each year, it may be repeated for credit

GREK GU4030 Philo of Alexandria: Life of Moses, On the Contemplative Life. 3 points.

We will read in the original language selections from three treatises -- In Flaccum, Legatio ad Gaium, and De Vita Contemplativa -- of Philo of Alexandria; aside from their importance as Imperial Greek texts, these essays provide essential and very rare evidence for the environment (early Imperial Alexandria) and thought of their author.

GREK GU4100 Survey of Greek Literature. 4.00 points.

This course provides a survey of Greek literature. It aims to improve students’ reading skills, familiarize them with some of the most canonical works of Greek literature, afford them a sense of Greek literary history, and introduce them to modern methodological approaches. Readings are drawn from the Classics Ph.D. reading list

GREK GU4105 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE I. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: at least two terms of Greek at the 3000-level or higher. Readings in Greek literature from Homer to the 4th century B.C

GREK GU4106 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE II. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: at least two terms of Greek at the 3000-level or higher.
Prerequisites: at least two terms of Greek at the 3000-level or higher. Greek literature of the 4th century B.C. and of the Hellenistic and Imperial Ages

CLCV UN1001 Introduction to Greek Mythology. 3.00 points.

The stories of the Greek and Roman gods and heroes are at the root of countless works of art, philosophy, literature, and film, from antiquity to the present. Many familiar phrases from the English language also derive from myth: an Achilles heel (and Achilles tendon!), a Trojan horse, Pandora’s box, and so forth. This course will introduce you to the broad range of tales that make up the complex and interconnected network of Greek and Roman mythology

CLCV UN2441 EGYPT IN CLASSICAL WORLD. 4.00 points.

This class tracks Egypt’s entanglement in the Greco-Roman world from the country’s initial welcoming of Greek merchants and mercenaries to the point at which Justinian shuttered its last remaining temple. In examining archaeological, textual, and artistic evidence, we’ll pay close attention to the flashpoints that divided society along ethnic lines (viz. Egyptian, Nubian, Levantine, Greek, and Roman inhabitants) and according to religious belief (among polytheists of Egyptian and Greek heritage, Jewish Egyptians, and Christians) as well as to syncretism, mixed marriages, and other integrative aspects of society

CLCV UN3009 Ancient Greek ＆ Roman Medicine. 3.00 points.

This course aims to identify, analyze, and discuss ancient Greek and Roman medical theories, observations, methodologies for diagnosis and treatment, and the philosophical and professional disputes that arose around them. This course is arranged thematically and focuses on common methodologies, such as reasoning from first causes, in contrast to epistemic observation and experience. Other broad themes include the relationship between medicine and natural history, and the connection between medical treatments and the rise of herbals as ostensibly reliable sources of information. By focusing on such general themes and methodologies, and by reading the original Greek and Latin texts in translation, this course will aim to provide an answer to the following questions: in what exactly did ancient Greek and Roman medicine consist and how did the field’s practitioners and theorists perform medical work, in their own words? There are no prerequisites for this course, nor does it require knowledge of Greek or Latin. It is equally suited to premed students, individuals with an interest in medical humanities, and Classics students

CLCV UN3059 WORLDS OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

This seminar looks at the narrative and the historical context for an extraordinary event: the conquest of the Persian empire by Alexander III of Macedonia, conventionally known as “Alexander the Great”. We will explore the different worlds Alexander grew out of, confronted, and affected: the old Greek world, the Persian empire, the ancient near-east (Egypt, Levant, Babylonia, Iran), and the worlds beyond, namely pre-Islamic (and pre-Silk Road) Central Asia, the Afghan borderlands, and the Indus valley. The first part of the course will establish context, before laying out a narrative framework; the second part of the course will explore a series of themes, especially the tension between military conquest, political negotiation, and social interactions. Overall, the course will serve as an exercise in historical methodology (with particular attention to ancient sources and to interpretation), an introduction to the geography and the history of the ancient world (classical and near-eastern), and the exploration of a complex testcase located at the contact point between several worlds, and at a watershed of world history

CLCV UN3060 Worlds of Alexander the Great Discussion. 0 points.

Corequisites: CLCV UN3059

Discussion section to accompany CLCV 3059, "The Worlds of Alexander the Great": examination of sources, interpretation and historiography; broad discussion as well as close reading of texts.

CLCV UN3101 The Archaeology of Ancient Egypt and Nubia. 3 points.

Thanks to the pyramids of Giza, the treasure of Tutankhamun, and other remains of royal activity, pharaonic Egypt is justly famous for its monuments and material culture. Equally fascinating, if less well known, however, are the towns, fortresses, cultic centers, domestic spaces, and non-elite cemeteries that have been excavated over the past 200 years or so. The archaeology of Nubia is also little known but fascinating on many levels. This course will focus on what archaeology can reveal about life as it was experienced by individuals of all social classes. Through a combination of broad surveys and case studies of some of Egypt and Nubia’s most culturally indicative and intriguing sites, we will explore issues such as the origins of inequality, state formation and its effects, the uneasy mix of state-planned settlements and village life, urbanism, domestic and community worship, gendered spaces, ethnicity and colonialism, religious revolution and evolution, bureaucracy, private enterprise, and the effects of governmental collapse on life and death in ancient Egypt and Nubia.

CLCV UN3111 PLATO&CONFUCIUS: COMP ANC PHIL. 3 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

Prerequisites: completion of first semester of CC recommended. Although separated by a distance of nearly 5,000 miles, Classical Greece and China witnessed the near-simultaneous emergence of complex, centralized city-states, intensive agricultural cultivation, urbanization, the growth of imperial administrations, and scientific and technological revolutions. Each also witnessed the emergence of competing schools of philosophy. This course surveys principal works of Classical Greek and Chinese philosophy (where possible in their totality). Our goals are both contextualist and comparativist. Alternating between philosophical traditions, we shall read, discuss, and analyze several works of ancient Greek philosophy and Classical Chinese philosophy within their unique historical contexts and in comparision to one another.

CLCV UN3220 War, reality and truth in Thucydides. 4 points.

Between 431 and 404 BCE, a world war pitted the sea empire of democratic Athens against the land-based hegemony of Sparta, the culmination of decades of cold war, uneasy coexistence and open conflict between the two powers. The first twenty years of this major event in ancient history are painstakingly recorded in a monumental work, the War of the Peloponnesians and Athenians by the Athenian Thucydides, a participant in the conflict. This remarkable and highly crafted text combines a hyperreal narrative season by season, analyses of causality, character and motivation, and competing ethical and practical interpretations. We will approach Thucydides' War in four different ways: as a piece of historiography; as set of political or social scientifically oriented demonstrations; as a philosophical meditation on justice and power in the world; and as a historical document for a richly interesting period. Are these four approaches mutually compatible and reinforcing ? The close reading of the text (for reasons of time, we will look at Books 1-5, 8 will be completed by engagement with secondary literature (four monographs and articles) and with contemporary documents (inscriptions), the latter offering a fragmentary counterpoint to Thucydidean narrative. After reading the text, we will spend time on thematic debates involving the narrative and contextual material. The aim of this close work is to produce a Thucydides beyond the clichés of contemporary punditry ("the Thucydides trap"), closely fitting within Columbia undergraduate training (where Thucydides has vanished from the Core), and bridging the gap between contextualizing and modernizing readings.

CLCV UN3321 War, reality and truth in Thucydides - Discussion. 0 points.

Between 431 and 404 BCE, a world war pitted the sea empire of democratic Athens against the land-based hegemony of Sparta, the culmination of decades of cold war, uneasy coexistence and open conflict between the two powers. The first twenty years of this major event in ancient history are painstakingly recorded in a monumental work, the War of the Peloponnesians and Athenians by the Athenian Thucydides, a participant in the conflict. This remarkable and highly crafted text combines a hyperreal narrative season by season, analyses of causality, character and motivation, and competing ethical and practical interpretations. We will approach Thucydides' War in four different ways: as a piece of historiography; as set of political or social scientifically oriented demonstrations; as a philosophical meditation on justice and power in the world; and as a historical document for a richly interesting period. Are these four approaches mutually compatible and reinforcing ? The close reading of the text (for reasons of time, we will look at Books 1-5, 8 will be completed by engagement with secondary literature (four monographs and articles) and with contemporary documents (inscriptions), the latter offering a fragmentary counterpoint to Thucydidean narrative. After reading the text, we will spend time on thematic debates involving the narrative and contextual material. The aim of this close work is to produce a Thucydides beyond the clichés of contemporary punditry ("the Thucydides trap"), closely fitting within Columbia undergraduate training (where Thucydides has vanished from the Core), and bridging the gap between contextualizing and modernizing readings.

CLCV V3230 Classics and Film. 3 points.

Considers cinematic representations of the ancient Mediterranean world, from early silent films to movies from the present day. Explores films that purport to represent historical events (such as Gladiator) and cinematic versions of ancient texts (Pasolini's Medea). Readings include ancient literature and modern criticism.

CLCV GU4106 Religions of the Roman World. 3.00 points.

The goal of this course is to convey an important amount of knowledge on the religious history of the Roman empire focusing both on paganism, Christianity and Judaism and their interaction. We will study the religious space, the agents of cults and religions, rituals and networks and dynamics of power. The course will also face the challenge to reconsider the points of view from which to think the religious history of the Roman Empire and therefore it will be an invitation to revise our intellectual tools and questions towards an awareness to what is at stake when an object of religious debate emerges

CLCV GU4110 Gender and Sexuality In Ancient Greece. 3 points.

Prerequisites: sophomore standing or the instructor's permission.

Examination of the ways in which gender and sexuality are constructed in ancient Greek society and represented in literature and art, with attention to scientific theory, ritual practice, and philosophical speculation. Topics include conceptions of the body, erotic and homoerotic literature and practice, legal constraints, pornography, rape, and prostitution.

CLCV UN3008 The Age of Augustus. 3.00 points.

The reign of the first Roman emperor, Augustus (27bce-14ce), has been seen as a Roman revolution, both political and cultural. Rome had for centuries been governed as a Republic, but a series of increasingly divisive civil wars allowed Augustus to create a new political system in which he exercised sole rule as the ‘first citizen’ within a ‘Restored Republic’. Augustus’ reign lasted more than 40 years, and established a model of autocratic rule that would last for four centuries. During this time there were profound changes in the political, social, and cultural structures of Rome. In this course, you will examine the nature of these changes, Augustus’ political strategies, military activities, and religious initiatives through his own writing, the accounts of (often hostile) historians and a range of literary and archaeological sources, including Roman poetry. Ultimately, we will address the question: how did Augustus achieve the seemingly paradoxical feat of becoming a monarch within a republican system?

CLCV UN3070 Polis: the Biography of the Ancient Greek City-State 650 BCE-350 CE. 4.00 points.

This course explores the history of the Greek city-state, first as a long narrative story from the obscure leap to stately forms in the Aegean basin during the early seventh century BCE, to the end of municipal forms in the late Roman empire in the fourth century CE. Is there a single polis form that develops and endures during this century ? This is the concern of the first half of the course. The second half explores implications of the polis as a social and political organism: as ideas, ideology and institutions; as self-interest; and as a site and a tool of domination. The possible consequences for the politics of living together will be examined throughout the course, which balances between history and political philosophy

CLCV UN3069 Society and Power in the Hellenistic Age. 3.00 points.

This course explore the Hellenistic world (not to be confused with the “Hellenic world”)— the spaces and communities in the Mediterranean, Africa and Western Asia, in the centuries following the destruction of the Achaimenid empire. The themes studied include the formation of large tributary empires, and their strategies for implementing control; local political agency; cultural interaction, within frameworks of imperial power, between Greek and non-Greek; social relations; economic history; and more. This world seems created by a historical accident, but might equally be described as the result of deep structural features (the convergence of polis institutions, the rise of a connected economy, the spread of Greek cultural forms). The interpretation of this extraordinary period has been influenced by a number of factors, some intrinsic to the field (the availability of rich documentary evidence), some extrinsic (the rise and fall of European colonialism); it also has been characterised by paradigm shifts (from decline to vitality to diversities). This course will offer the occasion to test paradigms of “globalization” across many ancient contexts. It will do so by close reading of courses, broader surveys, and constant engagement with historical problems. Its main focus will be on the third and early second centuries BCE (“high Hellenistic period”), with some attention paid to the following century. The historian Polybios (ca. 200 BCE-after 118 BCE) will serve as a guide for both periods, especially his narrative of the year 217 BCE which culminates in the narrative of the battle of Raphia (as well as the arrival of the Roman Republic on the political scene of the Eastern Mediterranean). The course aims to achieve the following goals. First, to impart familiarity with events in a crucial period of ancient history. Second, to impart with the physical, historical, and human geographies of the area covered by the “Hellenistic world”— in the longue durée. This means spaces and regions from Spain to Central Asia: ancient Afro-Eurasia.Thirdly, to learn how to read fragmentary or indirect sources, often documentary, and in conjunction with material and visual evidence. Fourthly, to read historical studies by modern scholars, evaluate academic argument (notably in the deployment of evidence but also of theoretical models), and to produce historical argument in exams and paper. Fifthly, to evaluate the history of the Hellenistic age from a number of angles: power and politics; pre-modern economic history; forms of “globalization” and “glocalization”; contacts between cultures under conditions shaped by political power and material forces

CLCV UN3071 Discussion - Polis: the Biography of the Ancient Greek City-State 650 BCE-350 CE. 0.00 points.

This course explores the history of the Greek city-state, first as a long narrative story from the obscure leap to stately forms in the Aegean basin during the early seventh century BCE, to the end of municipal forms in the late Roman empire in the fourth century CE. Is there a single polis form that develops and endures during this century ? This is the concern of the first half of the course. The second half explores implications of the polis as a social and political organism: as ideas, ideology and institutions; as self-interest; and as a site and a tool of domination. The possible consequences for the politics of living together will be examined throughout the course, which balances between history and political philosophy

CLCV UN3090 Isiac cults in contexts; Egyptian cults in the Graeco-Roman world. 3.00 points.

This course looks at the long history of the “Egyptian” cults (cults of Isis, Osiris, Anubis, Sarapis, and Harpocrates) mainly outside of Egypt and in periods much later than the Pharaonic heyday of Ancient Egypt, that is, the Hellenistic and the Roman empire. By looking at and closely reading primary documents in translation, visual evidence, and archaeological remains, we aim to explore critical issues in the study of ancient polytheism, such as sacred space, the role of priests, religious sociology problems, forms of religious, ritual dynamics, construction of emotions religious and the sense of self and community. An issue of particular interest is the relationship between religious ethos and economic life and the relationship with various forms of power. Questions of gender will be central to the problematique. In addition to the seminar, there will be frequent visits to the Met, individually or as a group

CLCV UN3015 Race and Ethnicity in the Greco-Roman World - Discussion. 0 points.

This course provides an introduction to ancient attitudes towards race and ethnicity. Students will be challenged to consider how categories of race and ethnicity are presented in the literature and artistic works of Greece and Rome, and how ancient thinking remains current and influential today. We will consider texts from antiquity including epic, history, medical texts, ethnographies, dramas, and novels, as well as material evidence intended to represent ‘foreignness’. Our case studies pay particular attention to concepts including notions of racial formation and racial origins, ancient theories of ethnic superiority, and linguistic, religious and cultural differentiation as a basis for ethnic differentiation. We will also examine ancient racism through the prism of a variety of social processes in antiquity, such as slavery, trade and colonization, migrations, imperialism, assimilation, native revolts, and genocide. By the end of the course, students will have gained a richer understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of the ancient world, and will be able to engage in discussions of identity construction in a comparative manner.

CLCV BC3601 Priestess, Queen, Goddess: The Divine Feminine in the Kingdom of Kush. 4.00 points.

The prominence of powerful goddesses (Hathor, Mut, and Isis), the reverence awarded to the queen mothers of Kush, and a series of sole-ruling queens (one of whom led her army in battle against the invading Romans), highlight the unusually high status of women in this ancient African society and serve as a fitting focus for the study of female power in the ancient world. This course will examine more closely the queens, priestesses, and mothers who formed an essential societal component in ancient Nubia and its complex systems of goddess worship, sacred sexualities, and family lineages, both royal and non-royal. Examining the rich funerary traditions and goods found in royal burials, and temple and tomb imagery, we will explore how ancient Africans of the Nile Valley understood female power and presence to be an essential enlivening element in maintaining Maat, the balance of male and female energies, in order to cultivate “divine right order” in the world and in the cosmos. In this six-week immersive seminar, we’ll examine the history of Kushite queens who served as powerful complements to their husband the king, as the central figure in the coronation ceremonies for their son as he assumed the kingship, and as rulers in their own right during a time when this level of power was unavailable to women anywhere else in the world. After surveying the earlier phases of the ancient African kingdom of Kush: Kerma (2600-1500 BCE) and Napata (900-300 BCE), we will focus on the last phase of the Kingdom of Kush – Meroe (300 BCE – 300 CE) where women truly came into their power

CLCV GU4190 PHILOSOPHY IN CLASSICAL ROME. 3.00 points.

CLCV GU4160 Reading Rome in the Middle Ages and Beyond. 3.00 points.

This course will examine the ways Rome has been described and imagined from late antiquity through the Middle Ages, when the imperial city was transformed into a Christian capital, renowned for its monuments and its complex historical significance. The city became the goal of pilgrims, visitors, artists and scholars, but also the subject of criticisms and satire, and continued to be so into the modern age. The great German poet Goethe wrote at length in his Italian Journey (1786-1787) about his enchantment with the monuments of “the First City of the world [sic]” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey (1786-1788), trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer [1962], p. 115), while at the same time he described the living contemporary city and its inhabitants through stereotypical and ethnic preconceptions. His near-contemporary Edward Gibbon declared that he was inspired to write his great work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as he contrasted the city’s classical ruins and the Christian Church of the Ara Coeli, once a pagan temple: “It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” Memoirs of My Life (1796). This course is not meant to be a history of post-classical Rome. Rather, we will consider and discuss a selection of interdisciplinary texts, written, visual and material (buildings, artistic works in various forms, including films, and other physical evidence) that present the transformation of old Rome into new Rome, but which also shaped the varied images of Rome in the Middle Ages, and beyond, even in modern times, as illustrated by the films included in the syllabus

CLCV GU4180 Friendship from Antiquity to the Present. 3.00 points.

At all times and in all places, human beings have established and cherished friendships, that is, affectionate bonds with individuals to whom they were not linked by blood relationship or erotic love. But what is friendship? This and related questions are asked in some of our earliest literature and remain relevant today. What is a friend? Can I really trust my friend? How many friends can or should a person have? And is it ever necessary to sever a friendship or "unfriend" a person? In this course, we will examine how philosophical writers of Greco-Roman antiquity—notably, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero—address these issues and how their discourse on friendship resonates through western thought, including in such writers as Aquinas, Montaigne, Bacon, Kant, and Emerson. We will put these theoretical approaches in dialogue with depictions of and reflections on friendship in letters, poetry, novels, plays, children's literature, and film, ranging from the second millennium BCE Epic of Gilgamesh to Elena Ferrante's 2012 bestseller My Brilliant Friend. These sometimes complementary and sometimes jarring juxtapositions will lead us to consider friendship both in its historically and culturally conditioned and in its universal aspects, and will, with any luck, inspire a new appreciation of this profoundly human experience

CLLT UN3125 Book Histories and the Classics. 3 points.

Prerequisites: HUMA CC1001 or HUMA GS1001COCI CC1101

This seminar will introduce students of classical literature to the history of the Western book, and to the relationship between book history and the transmission and reception history of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome.  Students will also learn how to make use of rare books materials including manuscripts and early printed books......

CLLT UN3126 Queer Classics: Desire, Embodiment, Backward Glances. 3.00 points.

While the word ‘homosexual’ didn’t appear in print until 1891, Ancient Greece and Rome were full of queers, people whose sexual behavior, desires, gender, and/or other characteristics were at odds with dominant norms. This course traces ancient queerness across three modules. First, we discuss primary evidence and scholarly attitudes towards homoeroticism and gender variance in antiquity. Second, we explore the reception of ancient homoeroticism at the turn of the 20th century, a period that witnessed an explosion of engagement with ancient queer icons. Third, we trace the transformations of ancient queer myths and imagery in contemporary popular culture, engaging with film, novels, Zines, and social media. No prerequisites

CLLT UN3127 Hercules: Hero, Murderer, Philosopher, Buffoon. 3 points.

Hercules is one of the most ancient, widespread, and enduring figures to emerge from the ancient Mediterranean. He is a figure of multiples: myriad labors, multiple wives, multiple fathers, and multiple identities. Together we will discover a broad range of literature on this hero and-like ancient writers and thinkers-we will use Hercules to explore mortality, divinity, masculinity, madness, and contradiction. We will read Hercules in different ancient genres, with a particular emphasis on Tragedy, Comedy, and Philosophy. The final units of our course will explore contemporary "heros," including the Hulk, "The Rock," and Disney's Hercules. 

CLLT UN3128 THE ARTIST AND THE DICTATOR: ROMAN WRITERS UNDER NERO. 3 points.

This course aims at highlighting both the most important general features and the most important peculiarities of the literary masterpieces produced in the age of Nero. The basic question we will be addressing in class is what it means to be a literary artist under the rule of a despot. In order to fulfill Nero’s megalomaniac need for exaltation, cope with his absolute power and, at the same time, maintain their personal identity and ethical values as writers, Seneca, Petronius and Lucan strove to balance in their works the emperor’s expectations and their own artistic designs. These artists were not free to write what they wanted to write for present and future generations, but they tried to write it nevertheless. In this course, we will examine the extent of freedom of expression under Nero; the rhetorical techniques Neronian writers resorted to in order to express tactful modes of oblique commentary and criticism; the difficulties of the individual’s liberty in a climate of dictatorial oppression; the ways in which literature helps us discover more about the society of a given time; and, ultimately, the universal and eternal desire for
artists to be themselves and express their own views in spite of mortal dangers. Such issues are all the more pertinent in the present day: in 1989, the novelist Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death by the ayatollah Khomeyni after the publication of The Satanic Verses and fled to the United Kingdom; in 2011, the visual artist Ai Weiwei, whose most recent installation is currently exhibited in New York City, at Washington Square Park, served 81 days in a Chinese prison because of his artwork against dictatorial regimes. He eventually left China and settled in Berlin.No knowledge of Latin is required, as the focus of this course is literary, historical and sociological interpretation rather than linguistic competence.

CLLT UN3129 An Odyssey of Odysseys: Receptions of Homer’s Odyssey from Antiquity to the 21st Century. 3.00 points.

Homer’s Odyssey, likely composed around the 9th or 8th century BCE, has had an enduring legacy. Our journey this semester will bring us into contact with a varied selection of artistic endeavors, spanning different cultures, times, and media, that draw on the Odyssey for material or inspiration. A guiding set of broadly-formulated questions will steer our course: Can we find in the Odyssey some of the same meaning, today, that it held for its original audience and that it held, subsequently, for later Greeks? Do receptions of the Odyssey try to recapture it, reframe it, refashion it, or become something independent? (Are these mutually exclusive options?) How do we read these works in light of the Odyssey, and also how do we re-visit and re-read the Odyssey in light of its receptions? It is no secret that the present bears the enduring weight of the past, but is the past changed as a result?

CLLT UN3132 Classical Myth. 3 points.

Survey of major myths from the ancient Near East to the advent of Christianity, with emphasis upon the content and treatment of myths in classical authors (Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Vergil, Livy, Ovid).

GRKM UN1101 ELEMENTARY MODERN GREEK I. 4.00 points.

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 Greeces 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?

GRKM UN1102 ELEMENT. MODERN GREEK II. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: GRKM UN1101 GRKM V1101 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: GRKM UN1101 or the equivalent. Continuation of GRKM UN1101. Introduction to modern Greek language and culture. Emphasis on speaking, writing, basic grammar, syntax, and cross-cultural analysis

GRKM UN2101 INTERMEDIATE MODERN GREEK I. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: GRKM UN1101 and GRKM UN1102 GRKM V1101-V1102 or the equivalent.
Corequisites: GRKM UN2111
Prerequisites: GRKM UN1101 and GRKM UN1102 or the equivalent. Corequisites: GRKM UN2111 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

GRKM UN2102 INTERMEDIATE MODERN GREEK II. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: GRKM V2101 or the equivalent.
Prerequisites: GRKM UN2101 or the equivalent. Continuation of GRKM UN2101. Students complete their knowledge of the fundamentals of Greek grammar and syntax while continuing to enrich their vocabulary

GRKM UN3001 Advanced Modern Greek I. 3 points.

Prerequisites: GRKM V2101 or the equivalent.

This semester we will continue to build language skills but with particular attention to speaking and writing Greek at the university level. We will focus on such topics as diaspora, history, politics, and identity. We will use materials from literature, critical essays, historiography, film, and mass media as a way to advance knowledge in Modern Greek literature and culture. In addition we will explore the diversity of Greek language as it is spoken in different regions and gain understanding of its evolution through time. Materials include: essays (Seferis, Theotokas); newspaper articles; television interviews (Flessa and Papanikolaou); advertisement; stand-up-comedy (Lazopoulos); music (art-song, rebetika, hip-hop); theatre (Demetriades); literature (Roides, Papadiamantis, Kazantzakis, Lymberaki, Karapanou, Galanaki, Charalambides, Chatzopoulos, Chouliaras).

GRKM UN3003 GREECE TODAY: LANG, LIT. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: GRKM UN2102
Prerequisites: GRKM UN2102 This course builds on the elements of the language acquired in GRKM1101 through 2102, but new students may place into it, after special arrangement with the instructor. It introduces the students to a number of authentic multimodal materials drawn from a range of sources which include films, literary texts, media, music etc. in order to better understand Greece’s current cultural, socio-economic, and political landscape. In doing so, it aims to foster transcultural understanding and intercultural competence, while further developing the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Topics of discussion include language, gender equality, youth unemployment, education, queer identities, refugees, and the multilayered aspects of the crisis.Pre-requisite for this class: GRKM 2102 or placement test. Instructor’s permission required if the students have not taken GRKM2102 or equivalent

GRKM UN3935 Hellenism and the Topographical Imagination. 3 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

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, sitespecific? 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?

GRKM UN3996 Readings in Modern Greek. 1 point.

The course allows students in Topics through Greek Film (GU4135) with an intermediate to advanced level of Greek to supplement their study of that course’s theme through materials in Greek. Each week we will be reading short texts (excerpts from novels and essays, blogs, newspaper articles) on a theme discussed that week in GU4135. 

GRKM UN3997 DIRECTED READINGS. 1.00-4.00 points.

Designed for undergraduates who want to do directed reading in a period or on a topic not covered in the curriculum

GRKM UN3998 SENIOR RESEARCH SEMINAR. 1.00-4.00 points.

Designed for students writing a senior thesis or doing advanced research on Greek or Greek Diaspora topics

GRKM GU4135 Topics Through Greek Film. 4.00 points.

Optional 1-point bilingual guided reading.

This course explores issues of memory and trauma, public history and testimony, colonialism and biopolitics, neoliberalism and governmentality, and crisis and kinship, all through the medium of Greek film. It brings the Greek cinema canon (Angelopoulos, Cacoyannis, Gavras, Koundouros, et al.) into conversation with the work of contemporary artists, ethnographers, documentary filmmakers, and the recent “weird wave” and asks: what kind of lens does film offer onto the study of a society’s history and contemporary predicament? The viewing and discussion of films is facilitated through a consideration of a wide range of materials, including travelogues, criticism, archival footage, and interviews with directors. The course does not assume any background knowledge and all films will have English subtitles. An additional 1-credit bilingual option (meeting once per week at a time TBD) is offered for students who wish to read, view, and discuss materials in Greek

GRKM GU4460 SUPERVISED INDEPENDENT RESEARCH. 3.00 points.

All supervisors will be Columbia faculty who hold a PhD. Students are responsible for identifying their own supervisor and it is at the discretion of faculty whether they accept to supervise independent research. Projects must be focused on Hellenic Studies and can be approached from any disciplinary background. Students are expected to develop their own reading list in consultation with their supervisor. In addition to completing assigned readings, the student must also write a Hellenic studies paper of 20 pages. Projects other than a research paper will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Hellenic Studies is an interdisciplinary field that revolves around two main axes: space and time. Its teaching and research are focused on the study of post-classical Greece in various fields: Language, Literature, History, Politics, Anthropology, Art, Archaeology, and in various periods: Late Antique, Medieval, Byzantine, Modern Greek etc. Therefore, the range of topics that are acceptable as a Hellenic Studies seminar paper is broad. It is upon each supervisor to discuss the specific topic with the student. The work submitted for this independent study course must be different from the work a student submits in other courses, including the Hellenic Studies Senior Research Seminar

GRKM W4821 The Greek Revolution of 1821. 3.00 points.

2021 marks the bicentenary of the Greek uprising against the Ottoman Empire—an event that captured European and American popular imagination and led to the founding of the Greek nation. The Greek Revolution became a site for enduring discussion of much larger questions about the international order, democracy, empire, nationalism, collective rights, slavery, monumentality, and the contemporary place of classical Hellas. In this seminar Hellenic Studies faculty and guest speakers take 1821 and its enduring legacies as a vantage point to examine the use of primary sources (including texts, songs, paintings, and films) across different disciplines (history, anthropology, comparative literature, architecture, political science, and queer studies), and reflect on the nature of evidence and how it features in public discourse and contemporary cultural politics. Lectures by Dimitris Antoniou, Stathis Gourgouris, Nikolas P. Kakkoufa, Paraskevi Martzavou, Mark Mazower, Neni Panourgiá, Karen Van Dyck, Konstantina Zanou, and others

CLGM UN3005 DICTATORSHIPS＆THEIR AFTERLIVES. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

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

CLGM UN3110 THE OTTOMAN PAST IN THE GREEK PRESENT. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

Almost a century after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman past lives on in contemporary Greece, often in unexpected sites. In the built environment it appears as mosques, baths, covered markets, and fountains adorned with Arabic inscriptions. It also manifests itself in music, food, and language. Yet Ottoman legacies also shape the European present in less obvious ways and generate vehement debates about identity, nation-building, human rights, and interstate relations. In this course, we will be drawing on history, politics, anthropology, and comparative literature as well as a broad range of primary materials to view the Ottoman past through the lens of the Greek present. What understandings of nation-building emerge as more Ottoman archives became accessible to scholars? How does Islamic Family Law—still in effect in Greece—confront the European legal system? How are Ottoman administrative structures re-assessed in the context of acute socio-economic crisis and migration?

CLGM UN3650 Mental health in Literature from antiquity to futurity. 3.00 points.

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

CLGM UN3800 WRITING RESISTANCE. 3.00 points.

Set within a transnational and transdisciplinary feminist framework, Writing Resistance will unfold and examine the ways traumatic, lived experiences of gender and structural violence, systematic oppression and precarity, incarceration, racism, and colonialism, have been silenced or submerged in canonical writing and official history making. As an antidote, we will attempt a “queering” of this patriarchal and “colonial archive” (Stoler), by shedding light and focusing on diverse forms of writing, autobiographies and biomythographies, poetry and fiction, and theoretical readings that are either produced by or centered on the lived experiences, psyches and bodies, of women, people of color, dissidents and incarcerated people, queer, transgender, and non-binary individuals, refugees and other historically and systematically marginalized voices and identities. Within the context of what has often been approached as “minor literature” (Deleuze and Guattari), the fragmented truths, interrupted stories, and the “descent to the everyday” (Das), will reveal not only traumas, suffering, and alienation, but also what Veena Das approaches as “poisonous knowledge,” where the gendered, queer, racialized, and political body, solidarity, and silence, return as resistance, reclaiming voices, visibility, and authorship

CLGM UN3920 WORLD RESPONDS TO THE GREEKS. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

This course examines various literary, artistic, and cultural traditions that respond to some of the most recognizable Greek motifs in myth, theater, and politics, with the aim of understanding both what these motifs might be offering specifically to these traditions in particular social-historical contexts and, at the same time, what these traditions in turn bring to our conventional understanding of these motifs, how they reconceptualize them and how they alter them. The overall impetus is framed by a prismatic inquiry of how conditions of modernity, postcoloniality, and globality fashion themselves in engagement with certain persistent imaginaries of antiquity

CLGM UN3921 The World Responds to the Greeks – Modernity, Postcoloniality, Globality- Discussion. 0 points.

This course examines various literary, artistic, and cultural traditions that respond to some of the most recognizable Greek motifs in myth, theater, and politics, with the aim of understanding both what these motifs might be offering specifically to these traditions in particular social-historical contexts and, at the same time, what these traditions in turn bring to our conventional understanding of these motifs, how they reconceptualize them and how they alter them. The overall impetus is framed by a prismatic inquiry of how conditions of modernity, postcoloniality, and globality fashion themselves in engagement with certain persistent imaginaries of antiquity.

CPLS GU4095 Mobility and Enclosure, Statelessness and Democracy. 4.00 points.

The volume and intensity of human mobility from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe remains dramatically increased nowadays, despite the overall restrictions in mobility imposed by the pandemic conditions worldwide. During the last decade refugee statelessness has evolved into as a quasi-permanent liminal condition of being within the political body of western societies, especially in so called border countries of the European periphery. The continuous expansion and multiplication of camps and hot-spots in countries such as Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, etc. has created different states of existence within the national territories, raising a wide range of issues that concern statehood, political rights, the right to equal treatment and access to public goods (i.e., health, education, safety, representation etc.), which concern the core social and political demands of a democratic polity. However, the antinomies and aporias related to refugee statelessness within the nation state are nowadays further aggravated by the pandemic conditions of the last two years. The pandemic has opened up a new space of unprecedented state intervention in the public and private lives of citizens, while reconfiguring the meaning of globalization. Questions of democracy, statehood and statelessness, mobility, access, restriction and enclosure are now re-conditioned under the two-fold historical contingency of refugee life and citizen life in a pandemic. In this course we address these emerging issues through theoretical, literary, legal, historical texts that highlight how long established social and political problems, imbedded in existing structures since the late 20th century, are currently intrinsically re-conditioned. Our intention is to serve a pedagogy that is alert to how the present time affects the social and intellectual life of people across borders and cultures, while retaining deep historical learning that establishes connections between radical new occurrences (such as the Covid pandemic or the refugee problem in the Mediterranean) and long term hard structural patterns

CLGM GU4150 C.P. Cavafy and the poetics of desire. 4 points.

This course takes C. P. Cavafy’s oeuvre as a departure point in order to discuss desire and the ways it is tied with a variety of topics. We will employ a number of methodological tools to examine key topics in Cavafy’s work such as eros, power, history, and gender. How can we define desire and how is desire staged, thematized, or transmitted through poetry? How does a gay poet write about desired bodies at the beginning of the previous century? What is Cavafy’s contribution to the formation of gay identities in the twentieth century? How do we understand the poet’s desire for an archive? How important is the city for activating desire? How do we trace a poet’s afterlife and how does the desire poetry transmits to readers transform through time? How does literature of the past address present concerns? These are some of the questions that we will examine during this course. 

CLGM GU4300 Retranslation: Worlding C. P. Cavafy. 4.00 points.

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 Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, 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

CLGM W3450 How to do things with Queer Bodies. 3.00 points.

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

CLGM GU4450 How to do things with Homosexual Bodies. 4.00 points.

Homosexuality, as a term, might be a relatively recent invention in Western culture but bodies that acted and appeared ‘differently’ existed long before that. This course will focus on acts, and not identities, in tracing the evolution of writing the homosexual body from antiquity until today. In doing so it will explore a number of multimodal materials – texts, vases, sculptures, paintings, movies etc. – in an effort to understand the evolution of the ways in which language (written, spoken or visual) registers the homosexual body 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 homosexual 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 understand homosexual writing in Antiquity? How is the queer body registered in Modern Greek Literature and Culture? Can one write the history of homosexuality as a history of bodies? These are some of the questions that we will examine during the semester

CLGM GU4600 Multilingual America: Translation, Migration, Gender. 4.00 points.

This course introduces students to the rich tradition of literature about and by Greeks in America over the past two centuries exploring questions of multilingualism, translation, migration and gender with particular attention to the look and sound of different alphabets and foreign accents – “It’s all Greek to me!” To what extent can migration be understood as translation and vice versa? How might debates in Diaspora and Translation Studies inform each other and how might both, in turn, elucidate the writing of and about Greeks and other ethnic minorities, especially women? Authors include Olga Broumas, Elia Kazan, Alexandros Papadiamantis, Irini Spanidou, Ellery Queen, Eleni Sikelianos and Thanasis Valtinos as well as performance artists such as Diamanda Galas. Theoretical and comparative texts include works by Walter Benjamin, Rey Chow, Jacques Derrida, Xiaolu Guo, Eva Hoffman, Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, Vicente Rafael, and Lawrence Venuti, as well as films such as The Immigrant and The Wizard of Oz. No knowledge of Greek is necessary, although an extra-credit directed reading is open to those wishing to read texts in Greek

CLGM UN3700 Politics of Violence: Conflict, Borders, and the Carceral State. 3.00 points.

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

CLGM UN3937 THE CULTURE OF DEMOCRACY. 3.00 points.

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