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
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
Anna Stavrakopoulou, PhD, Associate Professor of Theatre Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

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

THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN: BOUNDARIES, MIGRATION AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE

Dimiter Angelov, Borders, Migration, and Ethnicity in Historical Perspective

This introductory seminar aims to provide the general framework for approaching the topic of borders, migration, and ethnicity in the Eastern Mediterranean. We will be asking the following questions: What is a border? How have borders been understood and how have they functioned historically? What is the role of ethnicity and citizenship? To what extent did ancient city-states, empires, and nation-states have a different understanding of borders? Examining these questions will allow us to better understand the role of mobility and migration in the Eastern Mediterranean, from Antiquity through the Byzantine Empire until the modern era.

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.

Week 2, Thessaloniki, Central Macedonia

ROME AND CHINA: BOUNDARIES, IDENTITIES, AND OUTSIDERS BEFORE THE NATION-STATE

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 3, Nafplion, the Peloponnese

SPECIAL TOPICS ON THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN FROM THE BRONZE AGE TO THE 19TH CENTURY 

Sahar Bazzaz, Science and Empire in the 19th century eastern Mediterranean

This course considers the theme of migration and mobility through the lens of science and scientific exchange in the eastern Mediterranean during the 18th and 19th centuries.  We will focus on French and British natural history expeditions carried out in the region considering the connected histories of science, imperial expansion and inter-imperial rivalry (Ottoman, French and British), and the professionalization of science.

Gregory Nagy, Crossings of Boundaries between Social Order and Disorder in the East Mediterranean, from the Bronze Age to the Era of Alexander 

Boundaries between social order and disorder in the East Mediterranean were crossed in many different ways during a period lasting over a thousand years of prehistory and history, as surveyed in this seminar. Of special interest are (1) the emergence of a hybrid Minoan / Mycenaean civilization in the second half of the second millennium BCE and (2) the intensification of Hellenic and non-Hellenic differentiations in the “dark” and then “archaic” and then “classical” ages of the first millennium BCE. The seminar will highlight evidence for (a) cultural fluidity, in the late “archaic” and early “classical” ages, involving Greeks living inside and outside the Persian Empire and (b) contested models, operating in the earlier “dark” ages, of civilization as transmitted by mobile artisans who were juridically immune as they crossed boundaries from one petty kingdom to another. Primary sources to be read will include selections, in English translation, from epic and from “wisdom” poetry, together with prose accounts by historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, as also by antiquarians like Pausanias. In such ancient Greek sources, as also in non-Greek counterparts, the modern reader will find moral problems being posed about dysfunctionalities experienced by gods as well as by humans in the heroic era of myths—as opposed to the functionalism of social orders as they existed in the “post-heroic” era of rituals that recapitulated the myths. Here is a brief syllabus tied to secondary sources (mostly essays), with special references to ancient primary sources that are embedded in these secondary sources.

Week 4, Nafplion, the Peloponnese

THE MODERN EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN: MOVEMENT AND STASIS

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.

Yota Batsaki, Modern Greek Landscapes: Movement and Stasis

The imagination can attach itself to any geography, infusing it with the play of emotion and association. Yet few locales have invited this imaginative work as readily and repeatedly as the Greek landscape, due to its classical associations, the accounts of travelers from antiquity to the present, and the demands of modern nation building. At the interface between nature and culture, landscape is a “text on which generations write their recurring obsessions” (Simon Schama), imbued with richness, antiquity, and complexity. Through a series of literary, visual, and critical texts on the Greek landscape we will begin to explore how imagined geographies are formed, how they are sculpted by human labor and culture, and how they in turn shape those who inhabit or traverse them. We will end with the island as a space replete with the tensions of human belonging: a figure for both adventure and homecoming; a prison and a place of exile; and, in its most recent incarnation, a refugee camp.