This course will explore the crucial connections between migration, language, and translation. Drawing on texts from a range of genres and disciplines - from memoir and fiction to scholarly work in translation studies, migration studies, political science, anthropology, and sociology - we will focus on how language and translation affect the lives of those who move through and settle in other cultures, and how, in turn, human mobility affects language and modes of belonging.
This course explores the history of engagement by women writers and artists with the place, idea, and myths of Greece. We first read ancient female writers, preeminently Sappho, and examine the representation of women in ancient texts; we then trace the strategies through which "Greece" allows later women writers to assert their authority and authorship, question gender hierarchies and political/sociocultural paradigms, and lay a claim to the classical tradition. We consider how ancient writing affects contemporary understandings of identity and gender, and how modern works, from novels to plays to films, shape our view of the ancient world.