Artemis Leontis

Languages: English, Greek (Modern and Ancient), Latin

Affiliations: Classical Studies and Comparative Literature

Teaching interests: My teaching centers on Hellenism in the modern period with a focus on the language and culture of people living in Greece today and the cultural politics of intercultural contacts. As the director and coordinator of the Modern Greek program, I am responsible for curriculum building, academic advising, and public programming. The Program's language courses follow a multiliteracies approach in which students develop not only language competence but an integrated set of linguistic and sociocultural skills. Courses in language (taught in Greek) and literature and culture (taught in English) are intertwined with Comparative Literature through their attention to translation as a translingual and transcultural act, and to the place of Greece in the geographies and genealogies of European colonialism. Students learn to identify different ideas of the "Greek" and "Hellas" and to take stock of how they align with layers of power structure. My teaching includes courses in classical receptions (literature), adaptation (film) and heritage (material culture), in which students examine how and why contemporary works adapt, appropriate, translate, reimagine, and recontextualize ancient works.

Recent courses: 

• “Writing on the Wall” (ClCiv 121, First-Year Writing Seminar). The walls of Athens and other cities, including Ann Arbor, become a laboratory for exploring street writing: how and when it started; how it signifies; what are classic elements like tagging, bombing, trespassing, overwriting, making a statement; how it anticipated social media; and the visual ethics and moral rights of street writers. 
• "Translating Greek, Reporting the World" (GreekMod 330, Humanities) challenges advanced-intermediate learners of Greek to build their linguistic, cultural, and global literacies by translating present day reports, cartoons, creative works, commercials, advertisements, films, posters, poetry, and creative fiction and non-fiction. While practicing the craft of translation, students work through its principles, theories, process, purpose, and products, even as they produce a body of translations. Collaboration is key for students to recruit their different skills and solve problems together. 
• Greek Myth and Film (Comp Lit 382 / ClCiv 350 / GreekMod 350 for 3 hours, and Comp Lit 350 / ClCiv 341/GreekMod 341 for four hours) (Humanities). Students are introduced to Greek myths through film adaptations: not so much obvious adaptations ("Troy") but ones that interweave themes and elements of myths into their narratives. By following the transformations of stories from ancient sources into modern film, students consider how literature is adapted to produce new kinds of storytelling and new meanings. The explorations are filmic, generic, historical, political, and even practical (students make their own movies). 
• "Athens Present and Past (GreekMod 325, Humanities, Upper Level writing). Athens is both a museum of Greek history and a living entity: a laboratory for social experiments and a stage for ongoing conflicts. Defining features are the city’s dialogue with its past and reckoning with competing claims. This course studies that many-sided dialogue. Students learn to read intersecting narratives of competing claims on the “palimpsest” of the city’s multi-layered surface and consider the shape they give to city life in the present. The discover the city from its deepest layers to its dynamic, vibrant present. The course fulfills ULWR and Humanities. 
• Greek American Culture (GreekMod 318, American Culture 318, Race and Ethnicity) Who and what is “Greek” in America, and how did Greeks who immigrated to the United States become American? This class works through the complexities of the hyphen between the “Greek” and “American” to explore questions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class, labor conditions, power, privilege, belonging, and constructions of whiteness. Students engage directly with the materials of Greek immigration and acculturation to contribute actively to deepening and broadening the view of hyphenated Americans.

Research interests:  My research asks how the desire to align a corporeal, living Greekness with Hellenism, the idea of ancient Greece cultivated in the modern West, plays out in different arenas in the modern era. My first book, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (1995) compared Western travelers’ projections of their collective fantasies of Hellenism on Greece with Greek literary modernism’s reterritorialization of those projections, tracing how Greeks inscribed the texts, materials, and geographical notions of Hellenism into their national space. Since the publication of that book, my inquiry into the complex, competing figurations of Greekness has expanded in several directions, including literary translation and the study of material culture, visual culture, performance, and cultures of life. My new book, Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, a cultural biography, takes a comparative view of modern antiquarian practices outside the formal disciplines of philology and archaeology, in performance and self-fashioning.

My work addresses a range of publics, from specialists to students, journalists, and a broad, educated readership. I have edited a volume of Greek short stories for a travelers’ literary companion series (1999) and another book of illustrated essays on poems by Cavafy (2002). I have published a book introducing Greek culture to a broad readership (2009). The recent crossover book on Eva Palmer Sikelianos blends narrative and analysis to appeal to both academia and the general public. I have also worked in other media besides published articles and books. I curated a museum exhibit in the Kelsey Museum (“Cavafy’s World,” 2002), produced digital video recordings, designed websites, and collaborated with the Institute for the Humanities to bring three international graffiti artists to write walls in Ann Arbor (2016–2017). I wrote a companion piece, “Not Another Polytechnic Occupation! Reading the Graffiti on the Athens Polytechneio, March 2015,” published in the “Greece is Burning” Hot Spots series on the Cultural Anthropology website, reading a big graffiti piece in a very public spot in Greece and thinking about how it intervenes in popular rhetoric of memory and crisis. I have also just completed a project cataloguing and digitizing over 600 hidden letters of Eva Palmer Sikelianos in the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens. A book of letters is in process.

Book publications: 

• Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (Cornell University Press, 1995).  
• Τοπογραφίες Ελληνισμού: Η χαρτογράφηση της πατρίδας (Greek translation of Topographies of Hellenism, translated by. P. Stogiannos. Athens: Scripta, 1998). 
• Culture and Customs of Greece (Westport CT: Greenwood Press/ABC-CLIO, April 2009) in the series “Culture and Customs of Europe.” 
• Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2017)
• Εύα Πάλμερ-Σικελιανού: Υφαίνοντας τον μύθο μιας ζωής (Pataki Publishers, 2022) Greek translation by Katerina Schina. 
• “What These Ithakas Mean…”: Readings in Cavafy: coedited with Keith Taylor and Laurie Talalay of an illustrated book, published by ELIA, the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive (February 2002). (Cited in the TLS as one of the best books of 2002). 
• Greece: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, edited by Artemis Leontis (San Francisco: Whereabouts Press, 1997). 

Other publications: 

Select articles unrelated to the books:

• 2021 “Visiting the Statue of Ypsilanti in Michigan on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.” In Ergon: Greek/American Arts & Letters, special issue “Honoring the Martin Luther King Jr. Day: A Collection of Greek/American Narratives,” January 18, 2021. 
• 2021 “Writing Greek America: Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality,” Report on Erγastirio: Conversations on Greek America: A Collaborative Public Forum (UCLA and OSU), Ergon: Greek/American Arts & Letters, September 22, 2021, 
• 2020 “George Economou’s Invented Greek American Ethnicity.” In “George Economou: Four Tributes,” Ergon: Greek/American Arts & Letters, February 21, 2020, edited by Yiorgos Anagnostou and Christopher Bakken. 
• 2016 “Not Another Polytechnic Occupation! Reading the Graffiti on the Athens Polytechneio, March 2015.” In “Greece is Burning” Hot Spots series, Cultural Anthropology website, April 21, 2016, edited by James Faubian, Eugenia Georges, and Gonda Van Steen. 
• 2013 “Greek Literature Gains in Translation,” by Karen Emmerich and Artemis Leontis, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 31.2 (October): 278-280. Preface to the special co-edited section, “Selections from the Prizewinning Translations of the 2013 MGSA Elizabeth Constantinides Memorial Prize Competition” (281-316). 
• 2006 “A Day’s Journey: Constantinople, December 9, 1919.” Michigan Quarterly Review 45:1 (Winter): 73-98. 
• 2005 “Mediterranean Topographies before Balkanization.” In The Mediterranean Reconsidered. Representations, Emergences, Recompositions, edited by Mauro Peressini and Ratiba Hadj-Moussa, 235-248 (Canadian Museum of Civilization Mercury Series, Cultural Studies Paper 79). 
• 2001 “Mediterranean Theoria: A View from Delphi.” Thesis Eleven 67 (November): 101-17. 1999 “The Bridge Between the Classical and the Balkan.” South Atlantic Quarterly 98.4 special issue, “After the Garden” (Fall): 625-31.
• 1999 “Primordial Home, Elusive Home.” Thesis Eleven 59 (November): 1-16.
• 1997 “The Intellectual in Greek America.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 23:2: 85-109.