Harvard Summer Program in Greece

Dimiter Angelov, PhD, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History, Harvard University
Yota Batsaki, PhD, Executive Director of Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University
Sahar Bazzaz, PhD, Professor of History, College of the Holy Cross
Emma Dench, DPhil, McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History and of Classics and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
Eurydice Georganteli, PhD, Lecturer in Art History and Numismatics, Harvard University
Dimitri Kastritsis, PhD, Associate Librarian in 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, Harvard University
Jake Ransohoff, PhD, Mary Seeger O’Boyle Postdoctoral Fellow, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University

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 Zeus to Sabetay Sevi: Religion, Art, and Public Life in Southeastern Europe

This seminar explores South-Eastern Europe as a rich palimpsest of religious and linguistic practices through the study of art and architecture from antiquity to the early modern period. Mobility and migration have shaped rituals, languages, and cultural geographies and resulted in remarkable heritage sites and visual art from the Bosporus to the Adriatic Sea. The sacred precinct at Olympia, the Parthenon in Athens, the rock reliefs at Philippi, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul, the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, and the Dubrovnik Synagogue are some of the examples we will consider, to unpack legacies of creation, destruction, and reconfiguration of sacred space and works of art. These legacies remain central to national and regional politics and aesthetics and permeate ongoing conversations about migration, mobility, and citizenship in 21st-century Europe.

Gregory Nagy, Crossings of Boundaries in the East Mediterranean and further East, from the Bronze Age onward

Boundaries in the East Mediterranean and further East are crossed in many different ways during a vast period of prehistory and history as surveyed in this seminar. Of special interest for me are (1) narratives, stemming from the late Bronze Age and the early “Dark Age” dating respectively from the end of the second millennium BCE and the early first millennium BCE, about migrations and displacements of Greek and non-Greek populations and (2) narratives, stemming from later times, especially around the middle of the first millennium BCE, involving Greeks and non-Greeks in the era of the Persian Empire and beyond. Here is a brief syllabus tied to secondary sources (mostly essays), containing special references to ancient primary sources that are paraphrased in these secondary sources. During the discussion, I will present for our analysis some small samplings of relevant Greek passages, all translated into English.

Week 2, Thessaloniki, Central Macedonia

Dimiter Angelov and Jake Ransohoff, Eye of the World: Byzantium and Its Legacy

The Eastern Roman Empire, which today we call “Byzantine,” was centered for over one millennium (330-1453) on the city of Constantinople, known in the Middle Ageas as the “eye of the world.” This mini-seminar approaches Byzantium as the focal point and historical bridge between worlds—between East and West, antiquity and modernity—by exploring intriguing questions of power, identity, mobility, and inclusion. Who were the Romans, the Greeks, and the barbarians? How did Byzantine cities become a successful melting pot of peoples and traditions? In what ways did Byzantium’s political and religious culture spread into Eastern Europe and Russia? And how was Byzantium invented as a historical category in the modern period? Thessaloniki, Byzantium’s second main city, provides an ideal and inspiring setting for this exciting investigation.

Dimitri Kastritsis, Greece and its History: Empires, Nations, Migrations

This seminar introduces students to key themes for understanding the history of Greece and its people, which is largely one of empires and vast movements of people and ideas. We will begin with an introduction to the modern Greek state and its historical ‘baggage’, from antiquity to independence from the Ottoman Empire. Then we will consider the role of empires in history and in the movement of people and ideas. We will briefly examine the Ottoman Empire from which Greece was born, an empire which stretched from Europe to Asia and Africa and from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Finally, we will discuss some of the cultural heritage of the Ottomans and other medieval and early modern civilizations in Greece, and how this has been viewed and presented at different times.

Week 3, Nafplion, the Peloponnese

Emma Dench, The Roman Empire

Comparison with the Han Empire highlights some of the distinctive features of the Roman Empire. Together, we will delve into and analyze some fascinating examples of what Roman rulers and subjects of the Roman Empire themselves shared about their perspectives on empire. In particular, we will consider how the Romans understood imperial territories and their boundaries, how Roman rulers and subjects talked about governance, leadership, and rule, how rulers and subjects conceptualized and experienced their multicultural world, and differentiated between populations, and finally how bandits, pirates and nomads challenged many of the social, political, and economic ideals of the Roman world.

Michael Puett, The Han Empire

Our discussion of the Han Empire will be developed in comparison with the Roman Empire. The two empires were rough contemporaries: the Han empire (202 BCE-220 CE) coincides chronologically with the peak of Roman overseas expansion and the height of Roman imperial power. In comparison with the Roman empire, we will explore how the Han understood rulership and governance, how they construed the rise of empire vis-à-vis the forms of governance that existed in the past, and how they thought of themselves in relationship to the world outside.

Week 4, Nafplion, the Peloponnese

Yota Batsaki, Strangers at Home

This seminar focuses on displacement and belonging in our damaged world from theoretical, historical, visual, and literary perspectives. This year is the centennial of the Treaty of Lausanne, prompted by the humanitarian crisis of more than one million people displaced by the Balkan Wars and the Greek-Turkish War (1919-1922). The treaty was the first internationally mandated exchange of populations, uprooting the Muslims of mainland Greece and the Orthodox populations of Anatolia from their homes based on religion, and without possibility of return. Taking this historical milestone as our point of departure, we will explore the knotty ethics of hospitality; the violence that goes into the building of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation; the fallacy of purity and the elusive nature of belonging.

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

The expansion of empire, and the unraveling of empire, have generated mass migrations. 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 then build on the insights drawn from philosophical and literary texts about hospitality, exile, and cosmopolitanism to grapple with the contemporary treatment of refugees as one of the crucial political and moral questions of our time.