Modern Greek Studies offers a variety of courses each semester. There are seven semesters of language teaching, as well as courses in comparative literature, Byzantine Literature and history. Courses taught in anthropology or other departments will be cross-listed with Modern Greek when they are taught.
Spring 2020
Professor Elsa Amanatidou
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Introduction to Modern Greek A continuation of MGRK 0100. New students may place into it, after special arrangement with the instructor. The course continues on an integrative skills approach and aims to develop language skills, within a framework of specific topics and functions. The course objectives are to enable students to perform a range of tasks, master a minimum core vocabulary and acquire knowledge and understanding of various forms of Greek culture. |
MGRK 0200 MWF 12-12:50 pm
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Intermediate Modern Greek A continuation of MGRK 0300. New students may place into it, after special arrangement with the instructor. It aims to enhance language skills within a variety of registers and themes; enable the students to master, use and understand effectively essential linguistic structures; examine a variety of expressive forms within an authentic cultural context. |
MGRK 0400 TTh 1-2:20 pm
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In Other Words: Translating Greece This is an advanced undergraduate seminar that will offer students the opportunity to build on their linguistic, cultural and critical literacies, by translating from Greek into English. Over the course of the semester we will be thinking critically about texts, their ideological, historical and social coordinates and their embedded discourses of Greekness, community, diglossia, identity and gender, among others. In addition to translating from Greek into English, we will read and discuss essays on translation, in order to consider in an informed way the issues (untranslatability?) and types of decision making associated with the practice of translation. Three years of study of MGRK at Brown (equivalent of MGRK 0600) or elsewhere. A placement test may be necessary. |
MGRK 1800 Time: TBD
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Special Topics in Modern Greek |
MGRK 1910 |
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Modern Greek for Classicists and Archaeologists May be taken by students who have completed the previous sequences or by anyone who places successfully into the course. The course places emphasis on the improvement of writing and oral skills, via presentations, collaborative projects, conversations and assignments based on topics and texts, drawn from a variety of sources and cultural forms of expression. |
MGRK 2200 Time: TBD |
Professor Vangelis Calotychos
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Nationalism and Transnationalism in Film and Fiction Reports of the demise of nationalism always seem greatly exaggerated. How are notions of transnationalism dependent on rewriting the nation? This course revisits films of world cinema acclaimed for their national cachet from a transnational perspective and in dialogue with their literary intertexts. We will study these films’ fictional narration, cinematic articulation, and critical reception and consider how they signify in multinational networks of funding, distribution, production, conception, and critical reception. Students will analyze the political, ethical, and artistic stakes of confronting difference as both a located and universal stance or commodity. Films and texts chosen from across the globe. |
COLT 1440P TTh 6:40-8 pm
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Modern Greece in the World This course introduces the culture, history, and politics of modern Greece. No prerequisites; all texts in English. Putting aside exceptionalist claims rooted in antiquity, the course focuses on critical moments when Greece figures in the frontline of Balkan, European, and global events in the modern period: when, as historian Mark Mazower claims, “democracy’s cradle [is] rocking the world.” Literary, filmic, and artistic representations of such moments from within and outside Greece will illuminate issues of nationalism, modernization, sovereignty, and postcoloniality. Faculty at Brown from diverse disciplines working on Greece will be invited to address such questions through their own research.
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MGRK 1240 TTh 10:30-11:50 am
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Professor Yannis Hamilakis
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Archaeology, Materiality, and National Imagination in Israel and Greece: A Comparative Approach Israel and Greece have had very different histories and yet in both cases their constitution as nation states is intricately linked to conceptions of antiquity and the practices of archaeology. In this course we will examine prominent figures and central projects in Greece, Palestine and Israel from the 19th to the 21st c. and ask questions such as: What were the foundational genealogical myths in each case? How important is religion and how is it interwoven with antiquity and archaeology? How does colonialism intersect with nationalism in this relationship, and what are the colonizing effects of archaeology itself? |
ARCH 1425 TTh 1-2:20 pm |
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Material Culture and the Bodily Senses: Past and Present How do the senses shape our experience? How many senses are there? How do ancient and modern art and material culture relate to bodily senses? What is material and sensorial memory, and how does it structure time and temporality? Using media and objects, including archaeological and ethnographic collections at Brown and beyond, this course will study how a sensorial perspective on materiality can reshape and reinvigorate research dealing with past and present material culture. Furthermore, we will explore how sensoriality and affectivity can decenter the dominant western modernist canon of the autonomous individual. |
ARCH 2184 Th 4-6:30 pm
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