My name is Demetri Arnaoutakis and I took Modern Elementary Greek I and II with Prof. Karen Van Dyck. I am currently an undergraduate student at the University of Florida College of Medicine. My heritage is Greek so I was really excited that my schedule allowed me to take these classes during my senior year. I definitely was able to improve my grammar and speaking skills and even continue to refine them each time I visit family in Greece.

Karen Emmerich received her Ph.D. from Columbia’s Department of English and Comparative Literature in 2010; she has a B.A. from Princeton University (2000) and an M.A. from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2002). Her dissertation, entitled Seeing Things: Visual and Material Poetics in Twentieth-Century Greek Poetry, explores the importance of visual and material form to the interpretation and translation of poetry. Karen is also a translator of Modern Greek poetry and prose; her recent translations include Margarita Karapanou’s Sleepwalker and Rien ne va plus, Ersi Sotiropoulos’s Landscape with Dog and Other Stories, Amanda Michalopoulou’s I’d Like, and Miltos Sachtouris’s Poems (1945-1971), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of translation grants and awards from the NEA, PEN and the Modern Greek Studies Association, and is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University for 2010-2011.

When I first started taking classes in the Program in Hellenic Studies as a first-year undergraduate, I was a complete stranger to Greece. It was my experience early on, in the Beginning and Intermediate language and culture courses, that first fostered my interest not only in Modern Greek language, but also in Greek literature, history, theater and film. This early experience has stayed with me since, shaping my research interests and academic path. I am now working on a PhD in Anthropology and Film & Visual Studies at Harvard, writing on the Thessaloniki Film Festival, and have been living in Greece for the past year and half. In my academic work, as well as in my developing practice as an artist and filmmaker, I continue to be shaped by the works and ideas that I first encountered in those early language and culture courses.

I have very fond memories of Greek class with Prof. Karen Van Dyck. She made the class interactive and fun by bringing in movies like Zorba, and her friend who talked to us about Greek music in the 60s, and we even put on a shadow puppet show (Karaghiozis). I remember that Prof. Van Dyck only ever spoke to us in Greek and this made the class interesting and filled with these new sounds that we had to figure out. I also liked that she brought to the class the history, culture, and poetry of the language.
I'm a Master's student in International Relations now at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and am continuing to learn new languages. I am always listening to Greek music and reading notes or small pieces of news online and translating them in my spare time. I wish I had started earlier with Prof. Van Dyck (since I took the Greek beginners I and II courses during my senior year at Columbia) and had time to attend some of the summer language and culture programs in Greece.