Among its various activities for summer 2022, CHS Greece welcomed the Harvard Summer School study-abroad program in Greece from June 25 to July 31st for its 19th iteration. Fifteen students traveled to Olympia and Nafplio for an intensive five-week academic course on "Migration and Boundaries—Reconceptualizing Mobility in the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond," with daily seminars and multiple visits to sites of interest. The 2022 iteration of the program was implemented under a safety protocol against COVID-19, developed by the program’s directors and coordinators, utilizing our Center's and the University's resources and allowing for an untroubled experience for all participants. Despite these extra measures of precaution, the 2022 group admittedly enjoyed being part of a lively, intellectual, and tight community of faculty, guest academics, and fellow students, both inside and outside class, like all participants in the years before them; a success for this first iteration after the two-year hiatus, as well as a persistent characteristic of the Harvard Summer Program in Greece since its conception twenty years ago.
Starting in 2002, the Harvard Summer Program in Greece has been running annually except for two years due to the pandemic and is the oldest and one of the most successful Harvard study-abroad programs. It gathers a faculty of prominent academics who teach eight interrelated seminars during the first four weeks of the program and offer diverse approaches to the central topics of migration and boundaries by showcasing historical phenomena of the Eastern Mediterranean region from ancient times to recent years. The fifth and last week of the program is dedicated to developing the students’ final projects, for which 2022 students could choose between submitting a research paper or developing a creative project (such as a short podcast series) related to the themes of the program. Moreover, throughout their stay in Greece and as an integrated aspect of the seminars they attended, students had the chance to explore Olympia and Nafplio, as well as other significant locations in the Peloponnese and Mainland Greece, during weekend excursions and day trips.
Harvard Summer School organizes the Harvard Summer Program in Greece, and the Center for Hellenic Studies supports it logistically and administratively. Adding to this support, the Center has repeatedly been offering student scholarships and two fellowship awards for junior researchers for participating in the program. The student scholarships are traditionally given to students from Greece (University of Patras) and China (Fudan University). However, this year due to China's travel restrictions, they were awarded to two Greek students along with one more scholarship offered by the University of Patras. On the other hand, the 2022 fellowship awardees were Konstantinos Kalantzis, Assistant Professor at the Department of Culture and Creative Media and Industries of the University of Thessaly, and Theodora Patrona, Laboratory and Teaching Staff Member at the School of English of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. They each joined the program for one week as Visiting Scholars in Comparative Cultural Studies 2022-23.
Words fall short of describing the unique experience of the Harvard Summer Program in Greece. We hope the glimpses of the 2022 program's participants and activities shared in the following video, made by one of this year’s students, give even broader insights, and we welcome you to watch it.
You can also have a look at the Harvard Summer Program in Greece Facebook album with pictures from this and past iterations of the program, as well as explore more of its history on the webpage dedicated to celebrating its 20-year milestone.