This is the first semester of a year-long course designed for students wishing to learn Greek as it is written and spoken in Greece today. As well as learning the skills necessary to read texts of moderate difficulty and converse on a wide range of topics, students explore Modern Greeces cultural landscape from parea to poetry to politics. Special attention will be paid to Greek New York. How do our, American, Greek-American definitions of language and culture differ from their, Greek ones?
For students who have never studied Latin. An intensive study of grammar with reading of simple prose and poetry.
Prerequisites: LATN UN1101. A continuation of LATN UN1101, including a review of grammar and syntax for students whose study of Latin has been interrupted.
Covers all of Greek grammar and syntax in one term. Prepares the student to enter second-year Greek (GREK UN2101 or GREK UN2102).
Prerequisites: GREK UN1101- GREK UN1102 or the equivalent. Selections from Attic prose.
Prerequisites: GRKM UN1101 and GRKM UN1102 or the equivalent. Corequisites: GRKM UN2111 This course is designed for students who are already familiar with the basic grammar and syntax of modern Greek language and can communicate at an elementary level. Using films, newspapers, and popular songs, students engage the finer points of Greek grammar and syntax and enrich their vocabulary. Emphasis is given to writing, whether in the form of film and book reviews or essays on particular topics taken from a selection of second year textbooks.
Prerequisites: LATN UN1101 & UN1102 or LATN UN1121 or equivalent. Selections from Catullus and Cicero.
Prerequisites: GREK UN1101- GREK UN1102 or GREK UN1121 or the equivalent. Detailed grammatical and literary study of several books of the Iliad and introduction to the techniques or oral poetry, to the Homeric hexameter, and to the historical background of Homer.
Prerequisites: LATN UN2101 or the equivalent. Selections from Ovids Metamorphoses and from Sallust, Livy, Seneca, or Pliny.
Prerequisites: GRKM un2102 This course builds on the elements of the language acquired in GRKM1101 through 2102, but new students may place into it, after special arrangement with the instructor. It introduces the students to a number of authentic multimodal materials drawn from a range of sources which include films, literary texts, media, music etc. in order to better understand Greece’s current cultural, socio-economic, and political landscape. In doing so, it aims to foster transcultural understanding and intercultural competence, while further developing the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Topics of discussion include language, gender equality, youth unemployment, education, queer identities, refugees, and the multilayered aspects of the crisis.Pre-requisite for this class: GRKM 2102 or placement test. Instructor’s permission required if the students have not taken GRKM2102 or equivalent.
Prerequisites: LATN UN2102 or the equivalent. Selections from Vergil and Horace. Combines literary analysis with work in grammar and metrics.
In this course we will explore the experience of illness and healing in ancient Greece and Rome, with some exploration of other contexts such as Egypt, Babylonia, and Christianity down to modern Greece. The class will focus on close reading of documents, from the viewpoint of the ill and of those who try to understand illness and act on their understanding. We will pay attention to medical texts such as the diagnostic writing of the Hippocratic corpus or the treatises of Galen, but also popular texts and artifacts such as ex-votos.
This class will consider the idea and history of “the book” through history and around the world. Its primary objective is to introduce students to major topics and questions in “book history” while working to 1) resist the discipline’s traditional interest in modern European print culture and 2) situate that interest in global and transhistorical contexts.
Learning about the histories of books and writing in different eras and parts of the world will go hand-in-hand with critical examinations of how and why those histories have been periodized and narrativized the way they have. Although “book” is a technological category, we will consider how helpful technological narratives and comparisons of book practice and culture are. We will also engage not only in transhistorical and transnational comparisons of book culture and practice, but also examine the global book as a postcolonial phenomenon, marked by patterns of influence, appropriation and imposition across time and space.
This course will perforce be not comprehensive but instead oriented around case studies: we will be unable to examine every stage of every nation’s book history in detail. Rather, we will focus on objects and scholarly case studies that illuminate both the history and methods involved, and on productive points of contact. We will visit libraries and examine books both in person and through virtual simulacra.
What does it mean to tell “global” histories of the book? For our purposes, it means not assuming that the terms, categories, or periods of modern western book history should be definitive for other times and places. It also means examining the way that book cultures participated in and were shaped by patterns of exchange, conquest and colonization. We will explore points of contact across time as well as space.
By the end of the semester, students will be able to speak to the history of the book across several cultures and linguistic traditions, speak comparatively to dimensions of book practice in two cultures, and be able to present the history and comparative dimensions of a chosen object from Columbia’s special collections. Students will also become acquainted with the use of special collections libraries.
Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit.
This course examines the way particular spaces—cultural, urban, literary—serve as sites for the production and reproduction of cultural and political imaginaries. It places particular emphasis on the themes of the polis, the city, and the nation-state as well as on spatial representations of and responses to notions of the Hellenic across time. Students will consider a wide range of texts as spaces—complex sites constituted and complicated by a multiplicity of languages—and ask: To what extent is meaning and cultural identity, sitespecific? How central is the classical past in Western imagination? How have great metropolises such as Paris, Istanbul, and New York fashioned themselves in response to the allure of the classical and the advent of modern Greece? How has Greece as a specific site shaped the study of the Cold War, dictatorships, and crisis?
This seminar aims to provide students in the post-baccalaureate certificate program with opportunities 1) to (re-)familiarize themselves with a selection of major texts from classical antiquity, which will be read in English, 2) to become acquainted with scholarship on these texts and with scholarly writing in general, 3) to write analytically about these texts and the interpretations posed about them in contemporary scholarship, and 4) to read in the original language selected passages of one of the texts in small tutorial groups, which will meet every week for an additional hour with members of the faculty.
This seminar aims to provide students in the post-baccalaureate certificate program with opportunities 1) to (re-)familiarize themselves with a selection of major texts from classical antiquity, which will be read in English, 2) to become acquainted with scholarship on these texts and with scholarly writing in general, 3) to write analytically about these texts and the interpretations posed about them in contemporary scholarship, and 4) to read in the original language selected passages of one of the texts in small tutorial groups, which will meet every week for an additional hour with members of the faculty.
Prerequisites: junior standing. Required for all majors in classics and classical studies. The topic changes from year to year, but is always broad enough to accommodate students in the languages as well as those in the interdisciplinary major. Past topics include: love, dining, slavery, space, power.
Prerequisites: junior standing. Required for all majors in Classics and Classical Studies. The topic changes from year to year but is always broad enough to accommodate students in the languages as well as those in the interdisciplinary major. Past topics include: love, dining, slavery, space, power.
Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of reading in Greek literature, to be tested by a series of short papers, one long paper, or an oral or written examination.
Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of reading in Latin literature, to be tested by a series of short papers, one long paper, or an oral or written examination.
Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of research in Greek literature. Research paper required.
Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of research in Latin literature. Research paper required.
Prerequisites: LATN V3012 or the equivalent. Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit.
Prerequisites: at least two terms of Greek at the 3000-level or higher. Readings in Greek literature from Homer to the 4th century B.C.
Prerequisites: at least two terms of Latin at the 3000-level or higher. Latin literature from the beginning to early Augustan times.
Focusing on a canonical author is an immensely productive way to explore translation research and practice. The works of Sappho, Dante, Rilke, Césaire or Cavafy raise the question of reception in relation to many different critical approaches and illustrate many different strategies of translation and adaptation. The very issue of intertextuality that challenged the validity of author-centered courses after Roland Barthes’s proclamation of the death of the author reinstates it if we are willing to engage the oeuvre as an on-going interpretive project. By examining the poetry of the Greek Diaspora poet C. P. Cavafy in all its permutations (as criticism, translation, adaptation), the Cavafy case becomes an experimental ground for thinking about how a canonical author can open up our theories and practices of translation. For the final project students will choose a work by an author with a considerable body of critical work and translations and, following the example of Cavafy and his translators, come up with their own retranslations. Among the materials considered are commentary by E. M. Forster, C. M. Bowra, and Roman Jakobson, translations by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, James Merrill, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Daniel Mendelsohn, poems by W.H. Auden, Lawrence Durrell, and Joseph Brodsky, and visual art by David Hockney, and Duane Michals.
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Topics chosen in consultation between members of the staff and students.
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Topics chosen in consultation between members of the staff and students.
This course will enable students to complete a research study of considerable length that will (i) enable them to explore a given area of research in substantive detail; (ii) put them on the path to true competence as independent researchers; and (iii) provide those who go on to apply to PhD programs with a substantial writing sample that shows off their technical abilities to the best advantage.
The Graduate Research Colloquium is a forum that offers two types of research seminars over the course of the semester. In the first, formerly the Graduate Colloquium, up to six outside speakers are invited by the graduate organizers to present research papers to an audience of graduates, faculty and others interested within the larger NYC Classics community, and afterwards to engage in discussion. The second is a Work-in-Progress seminar in which Columbia Classics graduate students present their research to their graduate peers in whatever format they deem most conducive to conveying their research to their audience and receiving feedback. The audience for these eight seminars is restricted to graduate students, the instructor who presides over the course, and any faculty the graduate student presenters choose should choose to invite. At least one semester of the Graduate Research Colloquium is required for MAO students and PhD students must attend the course in both the Fall and Spring semesters of their first year.