Harvard Summer Program in Greece

Dimiter Angelov, PhD, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History, Harvard University
Yota Batsaki, PhD, Executive Director of Dumbarton Oaks and Co-Investigator of the Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities Initiative, Harvard University
Sahar Bazzaz, PhD, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History, College of the Holy Cross
Emma Dench, DPhil, McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History and of the Classics and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
Eurydice Georganteli, PhD, Lecturer on Late Antique and Medieval Art and Numismatics, Harvard University
Dimitri Kastritsis, PhD, Associate Librarian for Global Studies and Development, University of Virginia
Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, PhD, Associate Professor of History, Northeastern University
Gregory Nagy, PhD, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Michael Puett, PhD, Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Asia Center, Harvard University
Anna Stavrakopoulou, PhD, Professor of Theatre Studies and Head of the Theatre Studies Department, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

8 credits
UN, GR Limited enrollment.

This five-week course consists of eight interrelated seminars. Each week-long seminar meets daily (Monday through Thursday), for a total of four two-hour periods. Seminars run in pairs over the first four weeks of the course; students write two short response papers (two pages) per week. The fifth week is devoted to the writing of the final ten-page paper. Students are contacted about book purchases and preparatory reading in late spring; other material is available online and through access to Harvard digital resources. Seminar topics are listed below.

There are no prerequisites for this course and its seminars.

Week 1, Thessaloniki, Central Macedonia 

Eurydice Georganteli, From Minoan Crete to the Byzantine Empire Cultural encounters in the Eastern Mediterranean 

The seminar explores the Eastern Mediterranean as a rich canvas of cultural practices through the study of works of art, sites, and monuments from Minoan Crete to the Byzantine Empire. The natural environment, land resources, and sea and land routes have shaped connectivity, communities, rituals, languages, and culture, resulting in iconic heritage sites and visual art. The 2nd-millennium BCE Phaistos disc discovered on the island of Crete, the shrine of Asclepius at Epidaurus, the sacred precinct at Olympia, the Parthenon in Athens, the rock reliefs at Philippi, the Rotunda in Thessaloniki, and the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul are some of the examples we will use to unpack legacies of creation, reconfiguration, and destruction of sacred space and works of art. These legacies remain central to national and regional politics and aesthetics, and are the subject of ongoing, timely conversations about mobility, identity, and cultural heritage. 

Gregory Nagy, By Land or by Sea: Environments of Empire in the Mediterranean Region and Beyond

Empires take many different shapes, depending on their environments. In my seminar, I focus on two great empires that once flourished in an ancient era that dates back, roughly, to the latter half of the second millennium BCE—that is, toward the end of the so-called Bronze Age—in the Mediterranean region and beyond. One of these two empires was both land-based and sea-based, and it dominated not only a land-mass that corresponds today, roughly, to the modern European state of Greece but also the Aegean Sea, situated in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea. This ancient empire is commonly known to archaeologists as the Mycenaean Empire. By contrast, the other one of the two ancient empires we will consider was only land-based, dominating the land-mass that corresponds today, again roughly, to the modern state of Türkiye, better known to English-speakers as “Turkey.” This land-mass, separated by the Aegean Sea from the land-mass that now corresponds, more-or-less, to the European state of Greece, is commonly described by archaeologists as Asia Minor, and the empire that dominated this land-mass is commonly known as the Hittite Empire.
Of special interest, in my seminar, is a fact, established by archaeological evidence, that both the Mycenaean Empire and the Hittite Empire collapsed toward the end of the so-called Bronze Age. This twin collapse led to an era that has conventionally been called a Dark Age. As we will see in the course of our reading relevant evidence, however, the “darkness” of the Dark Age is contradicted by myths that stem from this era.

Week 2, Thessaloniki, Central Macedonia 

Emma Dench and Michael Puett, The Roman and Han empires 

The Roman and Han empires interacted only through intermediaries, and each had only a vague notion of the other, despite the fact that they were at their height at roughly the same time (between the 200’s BCE and the 200’s CE). Comparing and contrasting these two ancient empires offers us great insight into the different ways in which human, natural, and divine geographies and environments were understood and configured in the premodern world. We will focus particularly on ancient conceptualizations of the world and of the extent of Han and Roman power within it, on notions and enactments of imperial communities, and on ideas about and behavior towards outsiders. 

Dimitri Kastritsis, Reorienting Greece: The Ottoman Legacy 

This seminar aims to provide a historical and environmental context for understanding the modern Greek state, which was born in the early 19th century out of the Ottoman Empire and more or less reached its present form around 1922. In addition to modern Greek history, we will briefly examine Ottoman culture, which dominated southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa from late medieval to modern times. How did Ottoman attitudes, which represented a unique approach to older cultures and environments, differ from those of modern Greece and other nation states? And what, if any, is the Ottoman legacy for the region today? 

Week 3, Nafplio, the Peloponnese 

Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Migrants, Refugees, and the Environment in the Modern Eastern Mediterranean

The expansion and the unraveling of empires have generated mass migrations, and have played a crucial role in transforming the environment, while also being shaped by it. Our point of departure will be the break-up of the Ottoman empire and accompanying nation-state formation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which created vast movements of people in the eastern Mediterranean. The course will analyze pivotal moments in the voluntary or forced exchange of people and ideas in the region against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Ottoman modernization efforts, growing nationalism, and the aftermath of the Balkan and World Wars, with particular emphasis on the exchange of populations following the Greek-Turkish war of 1920-22. We will specifically examine the role played by refugees in transforming the landscapes of the Eastern Mediterranean into which they were moved, as well as their own transformations as they encountered new environments. We will then grapple with the contemporary movement of refugees in the Eastern Mediterranean and their treatment as one of the crucial political, environmental and moral questions of our time, while connecting the making of refugees to massive environmental destruction through warfare and climate change.

Anna Stavrakopoulou, An Enemy of the People: Environmental and Other Threats 

This seminar will examine the reception of Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People (1882). The play features a doctor who tries to save the patients of a spa-town with polluted waters, but becomes an outcast among his fellow citizens who rely on tourism for their survival. The play was adapted in the 20th century by Arthur Miller in 1950 for a Broadway production during the McCarthy era (late 1940s through the 1950s), where there was a strong emphasis on politics. More recently, in 2012, the German director Thomas Ostermeier (b. 1971) adapted the play with contemporary twists for an interactive production that became an international hit in over thirty countries. This play, which has resonated with the most improbable readers for over 140 years, will help us explore questions about the environment, ethics, democracy, and leadership under distress. 

Week 4, Nafplio, the Peloponnese 

Dimiter Angelov, Taming the Tyrant in the Greek Tradition 

This seminar introduces students to the complex history of the idea of the tyrant, an invention of the Greek tradition. We start with the climate-determined ancient Greek notions of oriental despotism (East) and uncivilized barbarism (West), and the introduction of the tyrant in antiquity as an internalized notion of “despotism” and “barbarism.” We then trace the way this concept was continually defined, redefined, refined, and debated from antiquity through the Byzantine Empire (where both tyranny and resistance were pressing political concerns) to nineteenth-century nationalism, ending with the Koraes-Jefferson correspondence at the time of the Greek War of Independence. 

Yota Batsaki, More-than-human migrations and belonging in the Eastern Mediterranean 

The Eastern Mediterranean is a key region of plant domestication and its legacies; it is also a region of rich biodiversity and ecosystem diversity with a long tradition of natural history writing going back to antiquity. The millennia-long interaction between humans and the natural environment has generated biocultural traditions and refugia of urgent significance and value. Through an interrogation of these traditions, and the textual and landscape records that they have generated, the course will also interrogate the circulation of organisms, ideas, and representations in the region from the perspectives of environmental history and the environmental humanities.