Asking participants to “Rethink Modern Greek Studies in the 21st Century”, the following two events will be open-themed:
Meeting 1: Oxford, 31 January - 1 February 2020
Meeting 2: Amsterdam, early autumn 2020 (exact date tbc)
Broadly speaking, we will welcome any topic engaging with Modern Greek Culture of the 19th -20th-21st centuries, but we will specifically encourage approaches that can offer a self-critical understanding of their methodology, social relevance and institutional frame, as well as a reflection on the field of Modern Greek studies today. Some of the specific research questions we aim to pursue in these first meetings are:
- How can we study the shifting position of contemporary Greece and its culture in
transnational frameworks and particularly in Europe and the Mediterranean today?
- What role can cultural, literary, film, visual and media studies, and more
generally the Humanities, play in shaping a new profile for Modern Greek
Studies as a research field that can adequately and creatively respond to recent
socio-political challenges and changes?
- What makes forms of cultural production in Greece relevant for international audiences or paradigmatic for new social and artistic imaginaries in Europe and the Mediterranean?
- What is the legacy (and/or the trauma) of the recent socio-political and financial
crises, especially in the way we see Greek culture and Greek Studies? Is the
discursive frame of the ‘Crisis’ still a pervasive lens in current approaches to
contemporary Greek culture and society or can we speak of a post-crisis
framework?
- How can we make Modern Greek Studies more multicultural, pluridisciplinary,
comparative, inclusive and less (pen)insular ?
- How can we critique and expand our analyses to move beyond Modern Greek
exceptionalism?
Based on research programmes and priorities already in place in the two contributing
departments and institutions, in the first meetings we expect to tackle topics such as:
- Rethinking the Greek cultural canon
- The rise of Greek street art, graffiti and the graphic novel
- New Greek Cinema and Theatre
- Classical reception today and its challenges in Greece
- Contemporary Athens as a new focus for international art, theory, and research
- New identities and the fight for public space, voice and visibility
- Attitudes to migration, displacement, mobility
- Reassessing past archives of displacement, movement, and transition
- (Greek) Crisis and Critique: ten years on – ongoing chronic crisis or post-crisis?
- Ethnic stereotyping, caricature, identity
- Crisis and alternative narratives of the present and the future: utopian,
dystopian, anti-utopian imaginaries
- Greece and the European South (cultural institutions, regionalism, new protest
cultures)
- New Queer Greece?
- Gender violence
- The rise of the neo-fascism and its cultural legacies
For a detailed programme of the first conference on the 31st January, 2020, please see here
For details of the presenter's abstracts for the first conference on the 31st January, 2020, please see here
