June 25, 2022
12:00 pm - 06:00 pm EEST
free online event

The Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in collaboration with the Hellenic Association for American Studies (HELAAS) and the kind contribution of the Fulbright Foundation in Greece is announcing the organization of the 7th Summer School to be hosted online by AUTh on: Saturday June 25, 2022.

The 2022 Summer School explores the impact the crises experienced globally nowadays have on a number of domains, such as politics, information circulation, the environment, and gender.

It is through an interdisciplinary lens that light is shed on:  media and journalism, hate speech and democracy, climate crisis and extreme adventure, gender violence and empathy.

With reference to a variety of digital and print sources, each seminar will attempt to examine the reasons behind these crises and the transitions these mark in the socio-cultural and political life, identity and sense of community.

We welcome applications from:

  • undergraduate and postgraduate students
  • researchers from all fields of studies
  • educators from primary, secondary and college education
  • IB students
  • the interested public

The language of the Summer School is English. The material to be used emerges from the field of American Studies without excluding its conversation with other disciplines and socio-cultural realities.  

For any inquiries, please email: Tatiani Rapatzikou (trapatz@enl.auth.gr) and Zoe Detsi (detsi@enl.auth.gr).

We thank you very must for your interest in our Summer School program. There are no more online seats available.
For any inquiries or if you’d like to be added to our waiting list, please email svergopo@enl.auth.gr (Stave Vergopoulou).

With our special thanks,
Tatiani Rapatzikou and Zoe Detsi
Summer School 2022 Organizers

EEST
12:00 pm - 12:15 pm
ZOOM LOG IN
12:15 pm - 12:30 pm
Welcome Addresses
12:30 pm - 02:00 pm
Nikos Panagiotou, AUTh
02:00 pm - 02:30 pm
BREAK
02:30 pm - 04:00 pm
Kristin Jacobson, Stockton University, US
04:00 pm - 04:30 pm
BREAK
04:30 pm - 06:00 pm
Emily Van Duyne, Stockton University, US

Dr. Nikos S. Panagiotou

Nikos S. Panagiotou is Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Media Communication, Aristotle University. He has been a DAAD Scholar at Deutsche Welle, Chevening Scholar of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office UK, RCAP Scholar from APU University Japan, Scholar to Beijing Foreign Studies University, Scholar at Sabanci University (Turkey), Scholar of the State of Luxembourg. He has an extensive research work which has been funded from Google (DNI Initiative fund). He is the initiator and organizer of Thessaloniki International Media Summer Academy. He is head of Digital Communication Network Global. He is Director of Peace Journalism Lab, member of the advisory board for Networking Knowledge. His research interests are upon: International Journalism, Audience Studies, Mass Media Literacy, Disinformation, Conflict Analysis and Resolution.

Dr. Kristin J. Jacobson

Kristin J. Jacobson is a professor of American Literature, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, USA. She completed her Ph.D. at Penn State, her M.A. at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and her B.A. at Carthage College in Kenosha, WI. Her book Neodomestic American Fiction (2010, Ohio State University Press) examines contemporary domestic novels. Her recent book The American Adrenaline Narrative (2020, University of Georgia Press) identifies a new genre of travel and environmental literature. The project defines and then examines the genre’s significant tropes from an ecofeminist perspective. She was the lead editor of Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women’s Literature: Thresholds in Women’s Writing (2018, Palgrave). Jacobson was a Fulbright-Greece scholar at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in the spring of 2018, and a Fulbright Specialist at the International University of Kyrgyzstan from February to March of 2019.

Dr. Emily Van Duyne

Emily Van Duyne is a survivor of domestic violence, having left a violent relationship in 2011. She is now Associate Professor of Writing at Stockton University, in New Jersey, and a current Fulbright Scholar in their American Scholars program, teaching at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In 2022, she received a New Jersey Individual Artist Fellowship in prose-writing from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. In 2020, she received a research fellowship from Emory University's Rose Library. Her work has appeared widely in magazines and journals such as Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Women's Studies Quarterly, and others. Her book LOVING SYLVIA PLATH is under contract with W.W. Norton & Co. She lives with her husband, Vincent, and their three children.

Abstracts

Extremis is challenging our societies and especially Western Democracies.Undermining trust in democracy and especially media is placing our Democracies in a multiple transition.  The aim of this presentation is to discuss a silenced but very important issue. The  increased number of hate speech attacks against journalists is “justified” in an environment of low trust in media and journalists. Journalists are not seen as the public watchdog anymore but rather representatives of the elites or corrupted. As a result they are alienated from the public that they represent while at the same time hate speech attacks are justified.

While a hero’s wilderness journey is archetypal, American culture arguably has its own, unique version of the individual’s relationship to wild places. Contemporary American culture is especially fascinated with cultures of the wild extreme. We see this in television shows such as Man, Woman, Wild and Alone as well as the films Into the Wild and Wild and the books upon which they are based (Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail by Cheryl Strayed). We live in an age where the marketing and consumption of extreme adventure is all around us in ways we might variously label both natural and unnatural: expedition jackets often see far more concrete sidewalks than rock faces and energy bars and drinks fuel work marathons or simply provide a quick meal on the go. This seminar will define this narrative, what I call the American adrenaline narrative, and explore its relationship to the climate crisis. Special attention will be paid to what the adrenaline narrative reveals about American environmentalism and the climate crisis. Participants will be asked to engage with a range of print and digital media to analyze the adrenaline narrative’s form and what that form reveals about the climate crisis. Participants will also be encouraged to make cross cultural connections, sharing how the adrenaline narrative does or does not cross eco-imaginations.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown fostered conditions that worsened intimate partner violence around the world. Here in Greece, femicide (“gynaiktonia”), already a problem, began receiving more media attention as women were murdered by husbands and boyfriends during the pandemic. But articles about this problem, such as “Femicide in Laconia marks 15th woman killed in Greece in 2021,”   by Stacey Harris-Papaioannou, note that sentences for these murders are statistically lighter than for others. This is also true in the US, where husbands, boyfriend, fathers, stepfathers, or brothers who murder their spouses or relatives receive lighter sentences than other killers, generally, and women who murder their male spouses receive longer sentences, even when they claim self-defense. Additionally, the philosopher Kate Manne has traced the ways “family annihilators,” or men who kill their entire families before then killing themselves, are portrayed in the US and UK media as people worthy of immense sympathy, while the lives of their wives and children receive scant attention.

How can this be? This seminar explores the legal and social history of intimate partner violence and murder through philosophical and imaginative literature, and seeks to understand why this violence happens, and why it is tolerated by our legal systems. We will read excerpts from Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Kelly Sundberg’s Goodbye, Sweet Girl, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, and Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House, and letters and poems by the poet Sylvia Plath. All of these works take on domestic violence as their subject matter– they range from social and philosophical analysis, to memoir, to poems and letters about survival. We will look at how our assumptions about who perpetrates intimate partner violence can obscure its victims. We will examine how narrative and poetics, as well as the epistolary format, offer us context and a roadmap to find empathy for victims of violence, whom we are frequently encouraged to ignore or re-victimize. Finally, we will spend time writing about these topics using prompts generated from the reading list.