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 2022
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 MTWTh 12-12:50pm |
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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 1-2:20pm
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Advanced Modern Greek A continuation of MGRK 0500. Students who have not taken the previous sequence may take a placement test, after consultation with the instructor. The course aims to promote range, accuracy and fluency and enable students to develop ease and spontaneity with the language. Authentic materials drawn from a range of sources inform the content of the course and include films, literature, media, testimonies, music and internet based sources. The development of transcultural competence will be an essential component of the course. |
MGRK 0600 TTh 9-10:20am
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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 Independent study in Modern Greek. |
MGRK 1910 Time: TBD |
Professor Vangelis Calotychos
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Reading the Short Story This course invites students to explore the pleasurable challenges of close reading within the context of a compressed form, the modern short story. Select works from the nineteenth century on wards—many of them masterpieces, some hidden gems from around the world—will help us question what we think they mean and how we know this. We will develop practices and techniques for articulating such quandaries even as we observe how sociocultural themes, theories of interpretation, and literary movements intertwine with expressions of the self and the politics of identity. |
COLT 1422M MWF 1-1:50pm
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The Classical World in Film Why do film directors, Hollywood moguls, and TV executives hark back to antiquity? This course introduces spectacular, epic representations of classical literature, myth, and history alongside more understated, tongue-in-cheek—occasionally hyperbolic—adaptations of that world in the present. Explores how narrative, cinematic technique, audience reception, and political context produce desired effects and elicit incisive commentary on modernity, race, ethnicity, gender. Analysis centered around a cluster of classical texts, heroic and mythic figures, and truly “historical” events. No prior knowledge of classical literature required. Films range from silent movies, Hollywood epics, European auteurism, anti-colonial Third Cinema, gladiatorial kitsch, and sci-fi franchise.
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MGRK 1010 TTh 6:40-8pm
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Professor Yannis Hamilakis
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Decolonial Matters: Thinking from the South This collaborative humanities seminar considers colonization as a material condition and focuses on decolonial practices from the ‘south’ that engage the matter and materiality of things, objects, artefacts, and landscapes, from archaeological remains to museum objects, works of art, and contemporary material traces of migration and border crossing. We will interrogate the material and racial basis of the 'south' and explore modes of thinking and practice (from indigenous perspectives to contemporary art) that can suture the relationship between objects and people. The seminar will also function as a workshop for student collaborations on decolonial experiments with material objects/sites. |
HMAN 2401M TTh 4-6:30pm
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A Migration Crisis? Displacement, Materiality, and Experience In the past few years, we have all experienced, most of us through the media, what has been called a migration crisis. And yet, migration as a phenomenon did not appear in 2015; it is as old as humanity, and displacement and contemporary forced migration have also a long history. In this course, we will examine the historical, material and experiential dimensions of contemporary displacement and migration. Many of the examples will be from Greece but also other parts of Mediterranean and beyond, including from the Mexico-US border. Engaged Scholarship Course. |
MGRK 1210 TTh 2:30-3:50pm |