Course contributors: Gregory Nagy, Dimitris J. Kastritsis, Sarah E. Insley, Dimiter G. Angelov, George Syrimis, Sahar Bazzaz, Anna Stavrakopoulou.
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 postcolonialism. 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 eleventh year, the five-week course consists of seven 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.
Prerequisite: none.
More information about summer 2014 will be available soon.
Applications for summer 2014 will be available in early December. For more information, please do not hesitate to contact us.
