Modern Greek Language Table
Come practice Modern Greek at our bi-weekly language tables! For more information, contact Maria Kaliambou (maria.kaliambou@yale.edu), Senior Lector, Hellenic Studies Program.
Alumni
Populism in Power: Discourse & Performativity in SYRIZA and Donald Trump
Populism has a complicated relationship with power and democratic institutions. Conventional wisdom assumes that populists cannot last in power; they either become mainstream or turn authoritarian. Such hypotheses are arguably rooted in systematic, anti-populist theorizations, which view populism always as a threat to democracy, connecting it with demagogy and irresponsibility and understanding it as a force that belongs to the opposition.
The War and the Fate of Ukraine's Nadazov Greeks
One of the most underreported human catastrophes of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the ongoing cultural and existential erasure of the country’s Nadazov Greek population, which, prior to the war, constituted the third-largest ethnic group (after Ukrainians and Russians) in the bitterly contested Donetsk region. Most of these Greeks were concentrated in and around the city of Mariupol, which they founded after Catherine the Great had resettled them from their ancient homeland of Crimea in 1778.
Neurobiology of Social Sensory-Motor Communication: From Speech to Dance
Constantina Theofanopoulou is the Herbert and Neil Singer Senior Research Associate at Rockefeller University and Visiting Scholar at New York University. She is the Director of the Neurobiology of Social Communication laboratory. Her research aim is to understand the neural circuits of complex sensory motor behaviors that serve social communication, specifically, speech and dance, and to identify possible therapies for speech and motor disorders.
Whiteness, Not White Supremacy: Lessons Learned from the Whitening Process of Ottoman Greek Migrants
Yiorgo Topalidis is a historical sociologist whose research explores the social construction, contestation, memory and forgetting of Whiteness and its decoupling from White supremacy. He engages with these concepts through historical case studies that feature the experiences of Ottoman Greek migrants in a US context.
Balkan Communism Revisited
In the past few years there has been a revived interest in how international Communism affected politics and society in the Balkan region during the Cold War. Most importantly, new research has convincingly shown that Soviet control was not uniform in the region and that the cracks that appeared on the surface of the Soviet bloc merit investigation as they expose significant differences at the societal, political, and cultural level.
Greece & Classical Music: In Myth and Tradition
Greece has a strong folk music culture and a tradition of Byzantine music (Greek Orthodox church music). These styles include musical features such as tropic modes and compound rhythms, musical elements that sound ‘exotic’ to the Western-trained ear. Furthermore, the music that is often associated with Greece around the world is an early 20th-century urban popular style known as rebetika (e.g. Zorba’s dance).
Documentary Screening: With Olive Groves in the Aegean: Greeks & Turks
In 1923 when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rebuilt modern Turkey on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, the Treaty of Lausanne ordered that all Muslims of Turkish decent who were living in Greece be exchanged with any Greek Christians living in Asia Minor. This population exchange of nearly two million people has left deep traces, many of which are still perceptible today. Fortunately one thing soothed the resulting pain and resentment: both Greeks and Turks had been growing olive trees since the olden days, providing a main source of survival and wealth.
Borders, Migration, and Ethnicity in Historical Perspective: Greek Americans and Italian Americans in Context
Theodora Patrona teaches literary courses at the School of English of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki as special teaching fellow. She has published extensively on Greek American and Italian American literature and film, and regularly reviews for journals and sites abroad. Dr Patrona is the author of Return Narratives: Ethnic Space in Late Twentieth Century Greek American and Italian American Literature(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017), and coeditor of Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation (Fordham University Press, 2022).
Modern Greek Language Table
Come practice and hear Modern Standard Greek with Maria Kaliambou, Senior Lector at the Hellenic Studies Program where she teaches folklore and Modern Greek language.
