These are the Special Subject options available in 2025-26. These are indicative of the course offerings for the sub-faculty, so applicants should note that not all options will run in all years, and some course content might change. 

[Core Seminar] Greek Literature and Culture in/after the 19th century: Themes, texts and contexts
Convenor: Prof. Dimitris Papanikolaou

This is the core postgraduate seminar in Modern Greek; it runs in Michaelmas term, and counts as one of your Special Subjects. It is advisable that all students interested in the modern period follow this seminar [Students with an interest in the Byzantine and Early Modern periods, should ask further advice before making their final choices.]

The aim of the seminar is to discuss and analyse Greek literary and cultural texts of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. To do so, each year’s seminar starts from a series of keywords (in the recent past keywords included: “adaptation/adoption”, “circulation, transfer, (dis)placement”, “family”, “the weird”, “performance/performativity”, “genealogy/ archaeology/ archive”). This year’s organizing keyword/concept is “The making of...”

As always, the aim is to also cover, from this fresh perspective, key larger themes and debates in Modern Greek studies (such as, for instance, storytelling and community, orality/textuality, the influence of Classics, the making and remaking of a Neohellenic identity, the difference between generations, ethnicity and difference, acts of citizenship and identity, and the appearance of new forms and movements). However, our approach will be more theoretical and, as much as we can, more geared towards creative discussions of literary and cultural texts and their contexts.

Students who want to work independently in their second term and devise their own focus of research, will be able to take this option for a second term, adding a subtitle with the specific theme that they will approach in Hilary and list it as: Greek Literature and Culture in/after the 19th century II [followed by a specific subtitle].

Translation and Adaptation: Texts, Histories, Practices (Michaelmas Term or Hilary Term) 
Convenor: Kostas Skordyles

The transference of literary works into another language is increasingly seen as a creative process, blurring the boundaries between translation and adaptation. Translation is often thought of not as a fixed concept but as forming a ‘changing’ textuality, whose boundaries are historically set by discursive practices and translational norms. In this seminar, students will be guided through key concepts in translation studies and various types of considerations that need to be taken into account in the production and analysis of literary translations. The theoretical work of L. Venuti, E. Gentzler, H. Vermeer, G. Toury, I. Even-Zohar and others will provide the framework for a close reading of a number of texts and their translations/adaptations into/from Greek. We will start from obvious examples (from the multiple translations of Cavafy into English, Kazantzakis’s various editions and translations and the famous translations of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into Greek by Seferis, Papatzonis and others, to Jenny Mastoraki’s Greek translations of The Catcher in the Rye or Vassilis Alexakis self-translations between French and Greek). But the students are expected, based on the theoretical and critical literature discussed, to search for new examples and organize presentations and essays on specific case studies.

The Remembrance of National History (Hilary Term)
Convenor: Kostas Skordyles

What does it mean to remember events that one never experienced? Why is the fall of Constantinople or the Asia Minor Disaster still considered traumatic by Greeks today? Why the name Macedonia continues to stir up strong affective reactions in contemporary Greece and beyond? What determines how national history is constructed and commemorated? In this seminar the analysis of mourning and loss, individual and collective memory, trauma and monumentality is combined in the light of a variety of theoretical approaches with a close reading of important moments in Greek history. The work of M. Halbwachs, P. Nora, P. Connerton, A. Erll, J. Assmann, B. Anderson, M. Hirsch, E. Hobsbawm, P. Ricoeur and others informs readings of a variety of cultural texts across the 20th century and ranging across different media: including testimonial literature on Asia Minor (from Doukas and Venezis to D. Papamarkos), performances and celebrations during the military dictatorship of 1967-74, films and Greek graphic novels.

Modern Greek Literature in Comparative Frames (Hilary Term) 
Convenor: Prof. Dimitris Papanikolaou

This Special Subject aims to encourage the study of 19th, 20th and 21st century Greek literature and culture in a comparative and world literature frame. We will start from the discussion of obvious and well-known case studies, such as: Greek Romanticism and its European counterparts; naturalism and the Greek iθoypap(a; Surrealism in Greece; Greek and other modernisms; European aestheticism and Cavafy; literature/culture duringthe Greek dictatorship and the global ‘60s; ‘Sung Poetry’ in Europe and the case of the Greek Melopoiemene Poiese; postmodernism in Greece and beyond; the reception of Greek literature outside Greece in different historical moments; Greece of the Crisis as a global moment; Greece and the Global South). Students will be asked to contribute their own examples and develop their own comparative perspectives, starting from specific genres, themes, or authors/artists, and moving on to explore movements, parallels, intertextual affinities, creative engagements and the dynamics of reading different texts and contexts together.

Cavafy in the World (Hilary Term)
Convenor: Prof. Dimitris Papanikolaou

The aim of this seminar will be to revisit the work of Cavafy, while also taking into account this work’s global presence and the way we can see this global presence as an opening to discuss current issues in Comparative and World Literature studies. This is a seminar about Cavafy, Cavafy in comparative contexts, and global Cavafy as a way to review debates on comparison, cultural capital, sexuality and biopolitics, archaeopolitics, worlding and translation. It is also a seminar that aims to discuss very recent fascinating insights on Cavafy (such as the recent special issue by Boundary 2 on Cavafy and postcoloniality; essays on queer Cavafy and Cavafy and cultural capital by Kosofsky Sedgwick, Faubion, Halim, Mendelsohn; the work of M. Boletsi on Cavafian hauntology; or the work by Gourgouris and Emerich on translation and adaptation) alongside older arguments, readings and bibliography; and, of course, alongside Cavafy’s poems and our own evolving relationship with them.