Athens, Greece

Undergraduate Language Courses

Elementary Modern Greek
HEL-UA 9103 (Level I) / HEL-UA 9104 (Level II) – Kargiotis – 4 points
No previous language experience required for V56.9103.
Prerequisite for V56.9104: V56.0103 or placement test.
As an introduction to modern Greek, this course provides students with the fundamentals of grammar, syntax, oral expression, listening comprehension, reading, and composition. Students develop the skills and vocabulary necessary to read simple texts and hold basic conversations. Students are introduced to modern Greek culture, history, and society, since the ultimate goal of the course is to enrich their understanding of multiple, living Greek realities through the language. Teaching materials include current newspaper articles, graded literary passages, songs, and various linguistic games.

Intermediate Modern Greek
HEL-UA 9105 (Level I) / HEL-UA 9106 (Level II) – Kargiotis – 4 points
Prerequisite: V56.0104 or placement test.
Designed for students who already have a familiarity with modern Greek. Students are expected to be acquainted with the most significant structures of grammar and syntax and to have acquired the foundations for basic conversation in Greek. The course introduces students to more complex linguistic and grammatical analysis, advanced composition, and graded reading. It also provides further practice in speaking, and works to enrich the student's vocabulary. Readings and discussions of selected works of prose, poetry, and theatre serve as an introduction to aspects of modern Greek civilization and as an occasion for comprehensive discussions of contemporary Greek society.

Undergraduate Courses in English

Modern Greek History
HEL-UA 159 Identical to HEL-GA 1124 - Santarelli - 4 points
What are the origins and consequences of the financial crisis that have shaken Greece and the European Union? Who will pay the social costs of the economic recession? Will the crisis have a significant impact on democracy, citizenship, and individual and collective rights? This course will challenge monocausal explanations of the crisis, and discuss the contributions that prominent scholars with differing beliefs and emphasis have advanced on these issues. While maintaining a focus on the global dimension of the Greek financial crisis, and its entanglements with the European economy, politics, and identity, we will examine the peculiarity of the Greek national context. We will explore the present-day situation of crisis and conflict in light of wider historical issues regarding the making of the modern Greek state, nation, and society. We also will consider how the attention that the financial crisis recently has drawn on Greece interrogates the antithetical, yet, interrelated, myths of Greece as either the cradle of Western civilization, or the site of its decadence. Class discussion will engage with broader issues of conflict, trauma, and resilience within societies exposed to long-lasting economic unrest, and analyze multiple responses relating to class, gender, age, as well as to the condition of citizens, migrants, or refugees.

The City of Athens
HEL-UA 9130 – Theodoratou – 4 points
Conducted in English.
Assuming that Athens serves as a window into Greek history and culture, this course provides students with an opportunity to encounter Greece through the architecture, monuments, art, and music of Athens. From its early beginnings as a center for art and literature, for commerce and industry, to its emergence as the capital of the new Greek state, Athens has always been a city in transition, a museum of Greek history as well as an active, living entity. It retains the traces of the political, economic, religious, and cultural history of Greece—in its streets, its buildings, its glorious artifacts and ruins—even as it struggles to move forward. Students are introduced to the beauty and history of a city whose identity is inextricably bound to mythology and to the history of a country that many regard as the birthplace of Western civilization. Visits to archaeological centers, museums, music bars, and several of the city's most important cultural and historical sites are included.

The Archaeology of Greece
CLASS-UA 9352 – Zafeiriadis – 4 points
Conducted in English.
In the world's literary and intellectual imagination, Greece is a land of ruins and monuments. Conceptualizing and idealizing Greece's ancient past, archaeology has played a crucial role in the discursive and ideological formation of modern Greece and Neohellenism. In this course, students are introduced to several of Greece's most significant archaeological sites - sites that bear the traces of Greece's prehistoric era, its classical past, the Roman conquest, the Byzantine period, and beyond. The course seeks to assess the various ways in which contemporary Greece has borne the burden of its antiquity and how its "past glories" are inscribed in its present cultural life as a modern Mediterranean, Balkan, and European country located on the crossroads of the East and West. For this to be achieved, we will read stories of Greek travel from a host of writers. The course considers materials drawn not only from archaeology but also from anthropology, travel accounts, literature, and cultural geography. Field trips to archaeological sites and visits to museums are included. Through individual projects and written assignments, students are expected to develop their skills of observation and analysis, as well as pursue an in-depth "reading" not only of Greece's past, but also of present day Greece in all its complexity and richness.

A Land of Light and Shadows: Modern Greek Literature and Photography
HEL-UA 9150 – Cadava – 4 points
Conducted in English.
All photography belongs to the sun, which is why, for George Seferis, it belongs to Greece. But what is it that encourages Seferis to focus, like a kind of camera, on the relations among photography, memory, and the sun? Since its advent in the nineteenth century, photography has been a privileged figure in literature's efforts to reflect upon its own modes of representation. This seminar will trace the history of the rapport between literature and photography by looking closely at a number of literary and theoretical texts that differently address questions central to both literature and photography: the nature of representation, reproduction, memory and forgetting, history, images, perception, and knowledge. Reading texts by Nadar and Charles Baudelaire, we will try to delineate this constellation of questions and then, using this set of questions as a kind of frame, we will spend the rest of our time tracing the ways in which the Modern Greek poets George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, Andreas Embiricos, and Yannis Ritsos repeatedly evoke the language of photography to talk about the nature of memory and perception, and to encourage us to register the way in which photography provides an entire vocabulary for what Proust calls "the optics of the mind": the flashes of insight and intuition, the light and shadows that enable and interrupt perception, the workings of memory as it tries to seize or fix an image, and in general the various ways in which we perceive or represent the world around us.

Graduate Courses

A Land of Light and Shadows: Modern Greek Literature and Photography
HEL-GA 9150 – Cadava – 4 points
Conducted in English.
All photography belongs to the sun, which is why, for George Seferis, it belongs to Greece. But what is it that encourages Seferis to focus, like a kind of camera, on the relations among photography, memory, and the sun? Since its advent in the nineteenth century, photography has been a privileged figure in literature's efforts to reflect upon its own modes of representation. This seminar will trace the history of the rapport between literature and photography by looking closely at a number of literary and theoretical texts that differently address questions central to both literature and photography: the nature of representation, reproduction, memory and forgetting, history, images, perception, and knowledge. Reading texts by Nadar and Charles Baudelaire, we will try to delineate this constellation of questions and then, using this set of questions as a kind of frame, we will spend the rest of our time tracing the ways in which the Modern Greek poets George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, Andreas Embiricos, and Yannis Ritsos repeatedly evoke the language of photography to talk about the nature of memory and perception, and to encourage us to register the way in which photography provides an entire vocabulary for what Proust calls "the optics of the mind": the flashes of insight and intuition, the light and shadows that enable and interrupt perception, the workings of memory as it tries to seize or fix an image, and in general the various ways in which we perceive or represent the world around us.

Graduate Independent Study
HEL-GA 9997 – Staff – 4 points

COSTS

8 points are required for undergraduate students to participate in this program.

Undergraduate Tuition
$6744 (8 points)

Graduate Tuition
$1111 (per point)

Program & Activities Fee
$800

International Health Insurance
approximately $70

Housing
$3300 Double Room (includes breakfast)

PLEASE NOTE: All students participating in the program are required to live in NYU-provided housing. Students are billed a standard housing rate in the spring. Housing charges will be adjusted at the end of the program based on actual housing assignments, which may result in an additional charge or credit issued in the late summer.

There is an additional registration and services fee of:
$250 for students registered at NYU for spring 2012
$276 for students not registered at NYU for spring 2012