Modern Greek

I developed the whole language curriculum in Modern Greek at Yale. Since 2007, I am teaching all levels of the language (Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced). I also taught folklore courses for superior students of Modern Greek. Additionally, I taught synchronous distance-learning courses with Cornell University.

My teaching philosophy in all my language classes bridges language with culture. For example, I use folktales as an alternative pedagogical tool to acquire the language. Based on my teaching experience I published my second book The Routledge Modern Greek Reader. Greek Folktales for Learning Modern Greek, Routledge, 2015, an anthology of twenty-five Greek folktales organized according to level of difficulty, suitable for both class use and independent study.

I am also a strong advocate for university dialogue with local communities, and design community outreach projects. In my language classes, my students conduct mini ethnographic projects with Greek Americans. The results of an earlier project were published in a booklet I edited with the title Interviewing Greek Americans.

Inspiring creativity is vital for my pedagogy. Thus, in all my language classes I assign creative writing exercises, such as writing poems, short fiction, or fairy tales in modern Greek. In 2011 I edited a collection of my students’ writings into an anthology (Modern Greek at Yale). Another example is an undergraduate theater performance written by a student based on the Greek folktale of Cinderella I taught in class (I edited the playbill of the performance Cinderella. The Light of God, 2012).

All my pedagogical strategies keep the students to the center of my attention. Through active participation, immersion and creative expression I want to give them opportunities to develop both professionally as well as personally. I teach them that learning either language or culture is an open-ended process, which lasts through the rest of their lives.

Folklore

Folktales and Fairy Tales

The course approaches, in the first part, the folktale as a genre of oral literature. Some basic concepts of the folktale and fairy tale scholarship will be discussed. The folktale will be placed in the oral literary canon by discussing and challenging the academic classifications of oral narratives. Topics such as performance, storytellers and audience will be analyzed. In the second part, the course scrutinizes the most important theoretical approaches, such as formalism, psychoanalysis, feminism and history-sociology. At the third and last part, the course will deal with the problem of orality versus literacy, as expressed in early European folk and fairy tales from Italy and France, followed by the Brothers Grimm collections through to popular chapbooks of fairy tales. The course will encourage a comparative reading of the primary texts from many European countries (German, French, Italian, English, and Hungarian). However, the course will place specific focus on Greek material and will challenge the applicability or relevance of the Western European scholarship to an oral tradition of a country of the European margins such as Greece. Texts will be available in English though students are encouraged to read available material in the original language.

Please see syllabus for more information.

European Oral Literature

This course examines oral literature from various European traditions. Specific focus will be placed on Greek material, but a comparative study of sources from other countries (German, French, English, and south Slavic) will be taken in consideration too. Among the large variety of oral genres we will concentrate on folktales, myths, and legends (oral prose) and folksongs, ballads, and epic (oral poetry). We will discuss the following issues: the concept of the genre, the academic definitions and classifications of genres; problems of tradition, history and continuity; gender-related distinctions; performance and audience; nationalist appropriations of oral forms; orality versus literacy. Texts will be available in English though students are encouraged to read available material in the original language.

Please see syllabus for more information.