Featured

Karen Van Dyck

Kimon A. Doukas Professor of MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE, Department of Classics

(212) 854-2189
vandyck@columbia.edu
515 Hamilton Hall

Office hours: Thursdays, 12 p.m.–2 p.m. or by appointment

Research Interests

Modern Greek literature
Women and Gender
Translation and Reception
Diaspora

Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Language and Literature in the Classics Department. Her research focuses on issues of translation, migration, and gender. She is the founding director of Hellenic Studies and has also been an active member of the Institute for Research on Women, Sexuality and Gender, the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society, the European Institute, and the Istanbul and Athens Global Centers. As an inaugural fellow at Columbia’s Institute for Ideas & Imagination (2018–19) in Paris, she continues to serve as an advisor in particular with regard to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI). Her books include Kassandra and the Censors (Cornell, 1998; Greek translation, Agra, 2002); The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding (Wesleyan, 1998); The Scattered Papers of Penelope (Anvil, 2008; Graywolf, 2009); Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (Penguin, 2016; NYRB, 2017; Agra, 2017); and the co-edited anthology, The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (Norton, 2009). Her work has appeared in the PMLA, LARB, the Paris Review, the Guardian, and World Literature Today. Her forthcoming book Translingual Worlds: Diaspora, Translation and the Greeks explores how the movement between places (diasporic, exilic, immigrant, etc.) maps onto the movement between languages (diglossic, intralingual, translingual, etc.) in literature and translations by and about the Greek Diaspora since the 1880s.

Here are some videos that the poets involved with her anthology, Austerity Measures, created, and here is an interview about the Greek edition of the anthology. Here is a piece about her translation of Margarita Liberaki's Three Summers (NYRB, 2019), reissued in the Penguin European Classics (2021). Her honorary doctorate speech on translation and migration at the University of Athens on March 23, 2022, can be found here. She recently published Lifted, a bilingual collection of poetry that explores the ethics of making poems out of other people’s prose and translations as it tells the story of a girl becoming a writer and translator (Agra, 2022, trans. Eleni Bourou). You can find videos of the book launches in NYC here and in Athens here.