Forms of Belonging: Citizenship, Migration, and the Modern Greek Literary Sphere

Speaker:
Karen Emmerich
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
Princeton University

When:
Thursday, May 21, 2026 | 18:00

Where:
Deree Faculty Lounge, The American College of Greece

Organized by:
The Institute for Hellenic Culture and the Liberal Arts – The American College of Greece

About the seminar:

This talk probes the connection between literary and legal modes of belonging in the Modern Greek sphere. How and when do writers come to be thought of as Greek, and how and when do they not? What does it mean to claim someone as a Greek writer, and what does it do to our under¬standing of their work? In thinking of nationality, citizenship, and literary belonging together, this talk seeks to denaturalize the category of “Greek writer” and to recognize the ways in which the construction of that literary sphere has interacted with shift¬ing legal frame¬works and sociopolitical understandings of who counts as Greek.

About the speaker:

Karen Emmerich is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she specializes in modern Greek literature and translation studies. She is the author of Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (2017) and the translator of over twenty books of Greek poetry, prose, and drama, including works by Yannis Ritsos, Miltos Sachtouris, Eleni Vakalo, Alki Zei, Margarita Karapanou, Ersi Sotiropoulou, Christos Ikonomou, and others. She has won the National Translation Award, the Best Translated Book Award, and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.