Undergraduate Courses

All undergraduate students must register for 8 credits.

HEL-UA 9103 Elementary Modern Greek I - STAFF - 4 credits

No previous language experience required.
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. A sample syllabus is available upon request by e-mailing summer.in.athens@nyu.edu

HEL-UA 9130 The City of Athens - Theodoratou - 4 credits

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. A sample syllabus is available upon request by e-mailing summer.in.athens@nyu.edu

HEL-UA 9140.001 Topics in Modern Greek Culture: Inside Greece’s Hip Hop Scene - Staff - 4 credits

Conducted in English.
The beginnings of hip hop music can be traced back to the streets of New York in the 1970s. Hip hop has been rooted in black culture and social commentary. At its origin, hip hop artists created music that combined traditional African-American forms of music, played in jam sessions and used to speak out on social maladies. Hip hop music has evolved over the years, to become not only a multi-billion-dollar industry, but also an attractive form for cultural appropriation around the globe. In Greece, hip hop arrives two decades later. Public Enemy and their sold-out concert in 1992 in Athens is a milestone event in the “birth” of Greek hip hop. FF.C (Fortified Concept), Terror X Crew and Active Member release their first album Protest at the end of 1992. However, it is only after 2010 and the European debt crisis that Greek hip hop is on the rise, engaging a wider audience. This course is designed to introduce students to the key moments in the history of hip hop music and its appropriation (from Kool Herc to Eminem and from Tupac and Kendrick Lamar to hip hop Latino Americano and K-rap), before delving into the Greek scene in an attempt to study Greekness through hip hop. An analysis of Greek hip hop songs will reveal how inextricably linked they are to the historical, cultural and social context in which they are produced and consumed. Q&As with artists and concerts attendance will be vital parts of the course. A sample syllabus is available upon request by e-mailing summer.in.athens@nyu.edu.

HEL-UA 9140.002 Topics in Modern Greek Culture: The History of Modern Greece - Staff - 4 credits

Conducted in English.
Is Greece a country between East and West? Does Greece belong to the South of Europe or, rather, to the North of the Mediterranean? Is Greece to be regarded as a unique, particular, and, so to say, exceptional case in the making of modern and contemporary Europe? This course will challenge conventional images of modern Greece, by exploring the mental mapping of Greece in relation to the, moral and historical, sites of Europe, the Mediterranean and the ‘West’. Along with historical documents and scholarly readings, classes will include an extraordinary selection of films and film documentaries. Cinematic narratives, deployed in Greece and abroad, will suggest provocative insights into the question, not only of how Greece became a nation, but also, and especially, of how ideas of Greece and its Other(s) have mutated over time and in space. We will examine how the meanings of Hellenism have been transformed by political, social and cultural conflicts, as well as by new cultural sensitivities relating to gender, class and citizenship.  Among others, topics will include: authoritarian politics and political dissent; war, civil war, and collective memory; religion, secularism and the state; violence, human rights and migration; the political economy of the Euro-zone and the crisis of democracy. A sample syllabus is available upon request by e-mailing summer.in.athens@nyu.edu.

HEL-UA 9143 Greek Drama - Staff - 4 credits

Conducted in English.
This course focuses primarily on selected plays of the three leading Athenian dramatists: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Plays are analyzed critically in relation to their cultural, historical, and theatrical importance. Situating the plays within the history of Greek drama, the course also assesses their continuing influence on 20th-century notions of performance. Students have the unique opportunity of attending performances of the plays by renowned theatre troupes in the ancient theatre of Herod Atticus in Athens and in that of Epidaurus. A sample syllabus is available upon request by e-mailing summer.in.athens@nyu.edu

CLASS-UA 9352 The Archaeology of Greece - Staff - 4 credits

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 sample syllabus is available upon request by e-mailing summer.in.athens@nyu.edu

Graduate Course

CLASS-GA 9201 Greek Drama - Staff - 4 points

Conducted in English.
For description, see HEL-UA 9143 above. Graduate students will need to complete additional assignments in coordination with the instructor and faculty director. A sample syllabus is available upon request by e-mailing summer.in.athens@nyu.edu

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