Modern Greek History

Catalog description

The history of modern Greece unfolds at the crossroad of Europe with the Mediterranean world, Africa, and the Middle East. Between 1821 and 1922, Greece turned from an Ottoman land into a nation state. War, revolution, class, and ethnic conflicts contributed to shaping different and, often, contrasting ideas of the Greek national identity, its rapport to Byzantium and classical antiquity, and its entanglements with notions of Europe, modernity, and empire. The trauma of two World Wars, fascism, and the Holocaust, as well as of the 1940s Greek Civil War, reshaped the social and ethnic fabric of twentieth-century Greece. A testing ground for the emerging politics of the Cold War, postwar Greece experienced a twisted road to democracy, one that in recent years has been challenged by the impact of the global financial crisis. This course will explore the making of modern Greece in relation to broader histories of nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism and its critics. The course will discuss why the case of Greece matters in transnational historical debates focusing on human rights, borderlands, and memory of the violent past.