Harvard Summer School 2010

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Harvard Summer Program in Olympia and Nafplio, Greece

Harvard Summer Program in

Olympia and Nafplio, Greece

A survey of cross-cultural interaction from ancient times to the present

Faculty: Gregory Nagy and Olympia Fellows

Olympia—birthplace of the Olympic Games—is a historical and symbolic reminder of the ideals of peace and international cooperation. Inspired by this unique site, the program seeks to promote cross-cultural understanding by combining historical, literary, philosophical, and linguistic approaches to cultural exchange. In the second half of the program we move to the facilities of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Nafplio, a seaside town full of modern Greek history. Students are exposed to historical periods from the ancient world to the medieval and modern eras. Thanks to the wide-ranging interests of its faculty, the program offers a rich curriculum that includes seminars, guest lectures, and weekend excursions, such as guided tours, and dramatic and musical performances in the most important historical and archaeological sites of Greece. In the past 8 years, the program has attracted students from many countries, including the United States, England, France, Bulgaria, Greece, Guatemala, Turkey, China, and the Philippines.

Note: The first 3 weeks are spent in Olympia and the last 2 weeks in Nafplio. Students are expected to arrive in Olympia on the weekend preceding the beginning of the program. Two bus trips will be arranged on Saturday, June 26, and Sunday, June 27, to take students from Athens International Airport to Olympia. Successful candidates are notified of the 2 departure times in late spring.

There are weekend visits to important sites in different parts of Greece, such as Athens, Delphi, Sparta, and Mystras/Monemvasia. During the week, there are also shorter beach-trips near Olympia and Nafplio. Archaeological visits to sites closer to our bases include ancient Olympia, Mycenae, and the theater of Epidaurus—where we attend a dramatic performance.

Course of study

For this course and its seminars, there are no prerequisites required. All seminars are in English, and students are always surrounded by proficient users of the English language. Student do have the opportunity to pick up some Greek, if they wish, through their interactions with Greek students and the immersion in the towns and experiences of Olympia, Nafplio, and the various other places we visit across Greece.

LITR S-107 Study Abroad in Greece: Cross-Cultural Contact Between East and West from Ancient Times to the Present (32256)

Dimiter G. Angelov, Panagiota Batsaki, Sahar Bazzaz, Dimitris J. Kastritsis, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Gregory Nagy, Anna Stavrakopoulou, and George Syrimis.

(8 credits: UN, GR) Limited enrollment

Focusing on the eastern Mediterranean, this course undertakes a diachronic examination of models of empire (Athenian, Byzantine, Ottoman), concluding with questions of nineteenth-century European and modern colonialism and post-colonialism. Particular emphasis is paid to legacies of Hellenism, and to the challenges and possibilities of cross-cultural interaction. The aim is to expose students to historical, philosophical, literary, and political models for studying this interaction.

Now in its ninth year, the 5-week course consists of 8 interrelated seminars. Each week-long seminar meets daily (Monday through Thursday), for a total of four 2-hour periods. Seminars run in pairs over the first 4 weeks of the course; students write 2 short response papers (2 pages) per week. The fifth week is devoted to the writing of the final 10-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.

Prerequisites: none.

1. Homer as a “Spokesman” for the Athenian Empire (Gregory Nagy)

The earliest form of the Athenian empire—the Delian League—was considered an expression of Ionian identity. This identity, once centered on the sacred island of Delos, was modified when the treasury of the Delian League was transferred from Delos to Athens, sometime around the middle of the fifth century BC. In terms of this transfer, the Ionian identity of the empire could be maintained and even reaffirmed most consistently on the basis of the idea that Athens is the mother city, or metropolis, of all Ionian cities.

A spokesman for the ideological world of the Delian League—and for the political reality of the Athenian empire—was Homer himself, figured as a universal poet and educator. This Homer was an imperial Homer, ideologized as koinos (common) to all Hellenes—at least, to all Hellenes in the Athenian empire. The status of Homer as the koinos polites (common citizen) of all Ionian cities is linked to his central role in the pan-Ionian festival of the Delia.

That festival— as we know independently from Thucydides—was reshaped in the late fifth century by the Athenian statesman Nikias, who sought to link the myths and rituals of the pan-Ionian Delia with the cultural and political agenda of the Delian League (that is, of the Athenian empire).

In this seminar, I offer an analysis of the pan-Ionian festival of the Delia, focusing on the acknowledged role of Homer as the spokesman for the Delia and, by extension, for the Delian League. I then compare the pan-Hellenic festival of the Olympic contests, held in Olympia. Students are guided through a set of relevant readings in translation of selected passages taken from Homeric poetry, and the lives of Homer, Thucydides, and Plato.

2. The Ottoman Empire: Legitimacy and Representation (Dimitris Kastritsis)

In the classical Ottoman Empire, sultanic power was expressed among in areas such as art, literature, diplomacy, and the functioning of government itself. This seminar aims to introduce students to the history of the Ottoman Empire and its legitimizing ideology as it developed from the mid-fourteenth to the late sixteenth century—the age of Süleyman the Magnificent.

By examining a variety of textual and visual sources, including chronicles in translation and visual representations of mosques and of the sultan's palace of Topkapi, we try to gain a basic understanding of the structure and functioning of the classical Ottoman state. In the process, we touch upon more general problems of textual and historical analysis, such as the advantages and limitations of a structuralist approach.

3. The Byzantine Empire: Ideology, Propaganda, and Subversion (Dimiter Angelov)

The Byzantine Empire (330–1453), is classic example of a universalist empire. By looking at textual and visual sources, this brief seminar explores the Byzantine construction of an ideology of empire—an amalgamation of Near Eastern, Hellenistic, Roman, and Christian ideas expressed in art, court rhetoric, diplomacy, and ceremony—and the ways this ideology was conveyed to the elites and the masses.

We also look at challenges to the ideology of empire, especially in the later period of Byzantine history, ranging from lingering Roman republicanism to Hellenic protonationalism and Platonic social utopias.

4. Archeology and Nationalism in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Sahar Bazzaz)

Since its development as a professional field in the nineteenth century, archeology has been intimately connected with concepts associated with political, social, and cultural modernity—nationalism and empire building, urbanization and industrialization, class conflict, democratization, and female education and enfranchisement—in an attempt to define the fundamental concepts of each period, such as civilization, evolution, and historicism.

This seminar examines how the search for and discovery of artifacts associated with the empires, societies, and peoples of the ancient Near East (for example, Assyrian, ancient Egyptian, Hittite, Phoenician, Mesopotamian and Judean) influenced the development of local national identities in the Ottoman empire as they emerged against the backdrop of the empire’s demise on one hand, and of the encroachment of European imperial powers into Ottoman realms on the other.

5. Mediterranean Encounters in the Modern Period, 1850–2000 (Ilham Khuri-Makdisi)

This seminar examines the Mediterranean in the modern period (1850–2000), as a space of encounters, circulations, and exchanges of people, commodities, ideas, and ideologies, but also as a space that divides as well as unites.

Through our close readings of 3 very different books—a memoir, Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli; a novel, Naguib Mahfouz’s Miramar; and a historical study, Mark Mazower’s Salonica: City of Ghosts—we focus on 3 central themes in writings on and representations of the Mediterranean. These are: Orientalism and the construction of the “other” across the Mediterranean and within a single country; the end of Empires, the emergence of nation-states, and their impact on Mediterranean societies; and the meanings and limitations of cosmopolitanism in Mediterranean port-cities.

6. Modern Legacies of Classical Sculpture (Yota Batsaki)

The seminar begins with an introduction to the function, techniques, and subjects of classical Greek sculpture, paying attention to its ideological, ritual, and imperial contexts. It then considers the aesthetic impact of the 2 important periods of archaeological rediscovery in the Renaissance and the eighteenth century. We concentrate on the theorization of classical sculpture in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, across the writings of Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Hegel, and Pater.

These theorists put forward a paradoxical evaluation of ancient sculpture as a synecdoche for classical excellence, but also as an anachronistic medium unable to capture the interiority, self-consciousness, and temporality crucial to modernity. At the same time, competition over prestigious collections of classical sculpture renders it an outstanding form of imperial import.

We conclude by examining the trope of the classical statue in literary works by Keats, Mérimée, James, Hawthorne, and Seferis, to understand why modern texts so often construct their modernity by contrast to the classical.

7. Theater in the Age of Empire: Late Nineteenth-Century Star Actors and the Circuits of International Fame (Anna Stavrakopoulou)

This seminar moves from the questions of imperial representation examined in the earlier courses on Ottoman and Byzantine history to a cultural history of theater in the age of empire. In the second half of the nineteenth century, while Romanticism was ceding its place to other literary movements, major changes took place representing a turning point in theater history: the shaping of the first stage directors in Europe, as well as the emergence of major playwrights, like Henrik Ibsen, who revolutionized the stage with his dramas.

At the same time, at the peak of colonialism, Europe started exporting stage actors, who dazzled audiences at the Comédie Française and Broadway alike. In this seminar we explore the colonial circuits of the star system of the time, with Adelaide Ristori, Eleonora Duse, Benoit-Constant Coquelin, and above all Sarah Bernhardt, breaking the barriers of their countries and gaining international acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.

8. “Our Greece”: Western Visions of Greece (George Syrimis)

This seminar examines the constructions of the terms "Hellenic" and "Greece" from the Enlightenment to the present through the prism of what we have come to call “Western” culture. We explore the relationship between adaptation and interpretation through various media (literature, film, philosophy, literary criticism), as well as the social movements that have informed our concept of the Hellenic (political, sexual, aesthetic, religious, etc.).

The seminar addresses the way in which ancient Greek civilization was refigured as an ideal cultural template, symbolic origin, and philosophical reflection for both contemporary Greeks and European Philhellenes. Materials include work by Lord Byron, Georgios Vizyenos, Thomas Mann, and C.P. Cavafy.

Course credit

See Study Abroad Credit Information.

Faculty

Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature in the Department of the Classics and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University; Director, Harvard University Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC

Senior Fellows

Dimiter G. Angelov (Medieval and Byzantine History), Lecturer and Research Fellow, University of Birmingham

Yota Batsaki (Comparative Literature), Newton Trust Lecturer in English, Cambridge University

Sahar Bazzaz (History and Middle Eastern Studies), Assistant Professor of History, College of the Holy Cross

Dimitris Kastritsis (History and Middle Eastern Studies), Academic Fellow in Ottoman History, University of St. Andrews, United Kingdom

Ilham Khuri-Makdisi (History and Middle Eastern Studies), Assistant Professor of History, Northeastern University

Anna Stavrakopoulou (Theater Studies and Modern Greek Literature), Assistant Professor of Theater Studies, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece

Visiting Fellows

George Syrimis, (Comparative Literature), Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Associate Chair of the Program in Hellenic Studies, Yale University

Application

All students, wherever they study—in the United States or abroad—can apply. In the past, participants have been recent high school graduates, undergraduates, graduate students, or independent scholars. Please note: Students must be at least 18 years old, have completed at least 1 year of college or be a first-year student, and be in good academic standing to apply.

The application materials, outlined below, are due February 5:

• A completed online application that includes:
  • A $50 nonrefundable application fee
  • A supplementary statement that describes interest in the program and any relevant travel experience abroad (previous travel is not a prerequisite), and that exhibits proof of English language proficiency for students whose first language is not English
• Official transcripts (sent directly to the address below; unofficial transcripts are accepted for Harvard College students only)

Transcripts should be addressed as follows:

Matilda West
Study Abroad Coordinator
Harvard Summer School
51 Brattle Street
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA

Students will be notified of admission decisions by late February or early March.

Cost

The cost of the program is $7,000 and a nonrefundable $50 application fee. This covers the following:

• Tuition
• Room, breakfast, and dinner
• All scheduled excursions and extracurricular activities

In addition to the program fee, students are responsible for:

• A health insurance fee ($175; waived if students have US insurance that provides coverage outside the United States)
• Transportation to and from Olympia
• The cost of passports and visas (if the latter is needed)
• Any immunizations

Program directors will advise students of likely additional expenses.

Suggested budget

See a suggested budget for estimated expenses.

How to pay and funding options

See How to Pay for payment deadlines, deposit amounts, and more information including funding options for Harvard College students.

Accommodations

In Olympia, accommodations are provided in Hotel Europa. Classes take place in a fully equipped seminar room—including video projector, printer, computer, and Internet access—within the hotel. Students share double-occupancy rooms and eat buffet breakfasts and dinners at the hotel; they make their own arrangements for lunch. Dinner is usually eaten outside in the garden. The hotel provides a free wireless Internet connection in every room, a tennis court, and a swimming pool.

In Nafplio we stay at one of the local hotels. Classes take place at the state-of-the-art facilities of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies, whose Greek branch was recently inaugurated.

Additional information

Program inquiries:

Contact Teresa Wu, summergreece@chs.harvard.edu.

Academic and administrative coordinators:

• Yota Batsaki, Newton Trust Lecturer, University of Cambridge, UK, pb324@cam.ac.uk
• Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Assistant Professor, Northeastern University, Boston, i.khuri-makdisi@neu.edu

Students with disabilities should contact the disability services coordinator as soon as possible. See Students with Disabilities for more information.

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