In recent years, the OSU Modern Greek Program has been intensifying its long-standing commitment to community outreach and public humanities. In addition to producing first-rate scholarship and teaching, the Program is developing multiple projects and initiating a number of collaborative partnerships for the purpose of documenting, generating, and promoting knowledge about Greek America and Greece to the broader public.
Specifically:
1) OSU Modern Greek Radio
Students prepare language broadcasts, which stream live over the Internet and are then turned into podcasts for public use. Student choose their own topics based on personal interests and language abilities. They choose their music and develop their own content, conducting interviews relevant to their chosen topic. For an archive of our radio programs, see https://u.osu.edu/greekradio/home/.
2) In their Own Words
A website featuring our students’ writings about Greek America: https://u.osu.edu/narratives/
3) Archiving Greek America
This website contributes toward the archiving of Greek America. It features articles, essays, newsletters, pamphlets, posters, photographs, brochures, newspapers clippings, community publications, catalogues, and announcements that faculty have been collecting through decades of research. This archive of largely public documents covers the recent past between the early 1990s up to 2010 or so. The archive is updated regularly (https://archivinggreekamerica.home.blog/).
4) Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters
An open access online journal offering memoirs, interviews, photography, scholarship, essays, poetry, and archival material associated with Greek America (https://ergon.scienzine.com/).
5) Community Outreach: The Program continues its collaboration with the Greek Olympic Society in organizing lectures by academics, poets, and fiction-writers in the community. Also, we collaborate with Ethos journal, in bringing humanistic knowledge to general readers in Ohio and beyond.
We are delighted to announce the following Forthcoming Collective Projects:
Greek(s) in Ohio (Brian Joseph, Christopher Brown, Stavros Constantinou, Yiorgos Anagnostou)
We are researching the Greek language in Ohio with several goals in mind: as a study in the sociology of language, we are interested in determining who uses Greek, i.e., the demographics of users of Greek (old-young, urban-rural, Orthodox-other, etc.); as a study in Greek dialectology, we are interested in determining the range of Greek regional dialects represented in Ohio and the linguistic features they reveal; as a study in sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics, we are interested in determining the attitudes that Greek users hold about the Greek language and in exploring what Greek American identity means to them; as a study in historical linguistics we are interested in determining how Greek has changed, if at all, as a minority language in an English-dominant environment; finally, as an anthropological/sociological study, we are interested in collecting narratives of the processes of immigration, integration, bilingualism, and the significance of Ohio and the broader Midwest to the lives of Greek Americans in the region.
Migrant Letters (Kostis Kourelis, Fevronia Soumakis, Yiorgos Anagnostou)
An open access website featuring letters written by and to Greek immigrants (more about this collaboration soon).
Notes
For news and resources from the OSU Modern Greek Program, visit us at https://u.osu.edu/moderngreek/
All projects are funded by the Program's Modern Greek Fund. Ergon and OSU Modern Greek Radio have enjoyed additional financial support by the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA).