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 (with the participation of current Fulbright Scholars and Fulbright alumni) is announcing the organization of the 8th Summer School.
The specific event has been approved by the CENTER OF EDUCATION & LIFE LONG LEARNING, AUTh.
ECTS: 2 (requires individual short writing activities & group projects)
The 2024 Summer School investigates methods of social learning and awakening of young students/citizens through the study of American Studies at the intersection with digital technologies, artistic practice, literary and cultural production.
Emphasis will be placed on new methodological approaches and transformative learning practices with the aim of exploring various avenues via which civic awareness and mobilization can be enhanced.
The seminars and workshops offered shed light on the new roles of the active citizen, explored through the prism of new media, information and communication technologies, education and civic pedagogy, artistic practice and community engagement.
The American cultural production will be interrogated/brought into the seminar room through language, literature, theater, AR installation art and digital media.
This is an event with compulsory attendance requiring
online attendance for Zoom sessions and
onsite attendance for all other lectures and workshops.
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
Summer School workshops and lectures are delivered in English.
The material to be used emerges from the field of American Studies while embracing the conversation with other disciplines and socio-cultural realities.
Registration fees
Non-students
- administration fee
- registration material
- coffee break
- access to Moodle/Elearning platform and digitized study material
Students
- copy of student ID proof would need to be submitted
- administration fee
- registration material
- coffee break
- access to Moodle/Elearning platform and digitized study material
Contact us
Get in touch for any inquiry.
Program
The Summer School takes place over 5 consecutive (working) days in a lecture and workshop format followed by individual or group projects:
Thursday, July 4th, 2024
10.00-12.00
ZOOM
“Active Citizenship and Historical Awareness in Twenty-first Century American Drama and Theater”
Konstantinos Blatanis
(lecture & workshop format)
12.30-14.30
ZOOM
“Augmented Realities: Environmental Justice Activism in AR Art Installations and the Pedagogical Implications in the American Studies Classroom”
Ingrid Gessner
(lecture & workshop format)
Friday, July 5th, 2024
10.00-12.00
AUTh Central Library Amphitheatre
“Reading with Care and Active Citizenship through Contemporary Transcultural Women’s Writing”
Efthymia Lydia Roupakia
(Lecture)
12.30-14.30
AUTh Central Library Amphitheatre
“From Active Readers to Mindful Citizens: A Hands-on Workshop”
Foteini Toliou
(Workshop)
Monday, July 8th, 2024
10.00-12.00
AUTh Central Library Amphitheatre
“Art and the Public Sphere: Interactive Soundscapes and Visual Installations in the Anthropocene Era”
Fani Boudouroglou
(Workshop)
15.30-17.30
ZOOM
“Activism through Artistic Literacy”
Rachel Moore
(Lecture)
Tuesday, July 9th, 2024
10.00-12.00
AUTh Central Library Amphitheatre
“Participatory Politics and Youth Community Building”
Despoina Feleki
(Lecture)
12.30-14.30
AUTh Central Library Amphitheatre
“Linguistic Landscape as a Guide for Participatory, Community-based Action in the World Language Classroom”
Meagan Driver
(Workshop)
Wednesday, July 10th, 2024
10.00-12.30
AUTh Central Library Computer Lab
“Locative Urban Walks & Civic Engagement: An Alternative Perspective to the City”
Vasileios Delioglanis
(Workshop)
Instructors
Konstantinos Blatanis
Konstantinos Blatanis is Associate Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His research interests and publications are in the fields of American literature, American drama and theater, popular culture, media studies, and critical theory. He is the author of the book Popular Culture Icons in Contemporary American Drama (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003) and co-editor of the volumes, War on the Human: New Responses to an Ever-Present Debate (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017) and American Studies after Postmodernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
Fani Boudouroglou
Fani Boudouroglou is a visual artist whose expressive medium is installation art, utilizing new, digital, and interactive media. She explores the relationships between art, technology, science, nature, and society, as well as the ways of interaction between humans and machines. Part of her artistic research includes a broader dialogue with the audience, encompassing workshops, lectures, and interdisciplinary educational programs. She founded and implements the AstronART project, an innovative model of a mobile laboratory for art, science, and new technological media. Her artistic work has been showcased in exhibitions in Greece and abroad at significant art exhibitions (8th Biennale-Thessaloniki, MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts, 3rd Biennale Larnaca, Vanitas. Stories from the Hereafter, MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art, Action Field Kodra, 49th Dimitria, Reworks Festival, Artistes a Suivre-French Institute of Thessaloniki, etc.). She has collaborated with directors and theater groups and has designed the artistic environment, scenography, and costumes for theatrical performances and performances. Her works are in private collections in Greece, Italy, and Germany, and two of her artworks are part of the collection of new acquisitions at MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art - Collections of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the State Museum of Contemporary Art. She teaches «New Media in Visual Arts» in the School of Visual and Αpplied Arts, at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH). She studied painting and holds a Master's degree in Advanced Computer and Communication Systems.
Vasileios (Vassilis) N. Delioglanis
Vasileios (Vassilis) N. Delioglanis is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is an adjunct lecturer in Greek universities and an appointed teacher in Greek Education. He holds a Ph.D. in Locative Media and North American Literature and Culture (from the School of English, AUTh), funded by the Board of Greek State Scholarships Foundation (I.K.Y.). He also holds an M.A. in American Literature and Culture, and a B.A. in English from the School of English, AUTh, Greece. He is the webmaster of the European Association for American Studies (EAAS) and a member of the Multimodal Research and Reading Group of the School of English, AUTh. His research focuses on contemporary American literature and culture, locative media and games, and the fusion of literary practice with new media technologies. His monograph, entitled Narrating Locative Media, was published in 2023 by Palgrave Macmillan.
Meagan Driver
Meagan Driver is an assistant professor in the Department of Romance and Classical Studies and a core faculty member in the Second Language Studies (SLS) Ph.D. Program at Michigan State University. As an applied linguist, she specializes in mixed-methods approaches to heritage and Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Presently, her work explores the relationship between various emotions, motivation, and questions surrounding linguistic and ethnoracial identity, specifically with respect to the acquisition of a heritage or foreign language. At MSU, she teaches undergraduate, masters, and Ph.D. courses in applied linguistics and SLA in both the Spanish and SLS programs.
Despoina Feleki
Despoina Feleki is appointed School Principal in Greek Education. She completed her post-doctoral research project in the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), Greece. She holds a PhD in Contemporary American Literature (AUTh) and her MA studies focus on European Literature and Culture (School of Philosophy, AUTh). Feleki teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses and organizes workshops on fiction and pedagogy, focusing on the intersections between textuality and digitality and on how these affect literary and educational practices. Currently she is teaching in the Lifelong elearing course (AUTh) titled “Multimodality: Print and Digital Anglophone Narratives.” Her research interests include digital age civics, Young Adult Literature, Popular Culture, Fandom and Videogame Studies. Her monograph, titled Stephen King in the New Millennium: Gothic Mediations on New Writing Materialities, was out by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2018. She co-edited the 4th Special Issue of the HELAAS online open access journal with the title “Popular Culture in a New Media Age: Trends and Transitions” (2019). Some of her published articles appear in GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Digital Literary Production and the Humanities (AUTh), Writing Technologies by Nottingham Trent University, Authorship, the Journal of the University of Ghent, and AmLit- American Literatures, University of Graz.
Ingrid Gessner
Ingrid Gessner is Professor for English and American Studies at the University College of Education Vorarlberg in Feldkirch, Austria. She has been a Visiting Professor of American Studies at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Her studies have also led her to the University of California, Davis, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her book Yellow Fever Years: An Epidemiology of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (2016) has been awarded the Peter Lang Young Scholars Award. She is the author of Collective Memory as Catharsis? The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Public Controversy (2000) and of the award-winning From Sites of Memory to Cybersights: (Re)Framing Japanese American Experiences (2007). Further publications include articles on feminism and gender studies, on questions of transnationalism, and on teaching American Studies. In the field of the digital humanities, she has published “Notes on the State of Digital American Studies Scholarship, Publishing, and Teaching” (2019), edited a special issue on “Digital Pedagogy in American Studies” (2020), and curated a special forum on “Digitization, Digital Humanities, and American Studies” (2023). In 2015, she published “The Aesthetics of Remembering 9/11: Toward a Transnational Typology of Memorials” in the Journal of Transnational American Studies. This article served as the basis for a DH project, which includes a searchable geolocative database showcasing 9/11 memorials worldwide. Since 2019, she serves on the editorial boards of two prestigious open access journals, Amerikastudien / American Studies and the Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS). Since April 2024 she is the President of the European Association for American Studies.
Rachel Moore
Rachel Moore currently lives and works in Stowe, Vermont as an interdisciplinary artist, organizer, curator, and the director of The Current, a center for contemporary art. She believes in art as a catalyst for change, and therefore in her studio and curatorial practices she brings to light environmental or social injustice through research, narrative, and socially engaged work that serves to create the necessary action to provoke change. Moore is a co-founder of Spoke, an exhibition and event space in Chicago (2008-2011), and was a Fulbright Fellow in Greece (2009-2010). She has received numerous grants for both curatorial and studio practices such as Seattle Art Museum (PONCHO Award), Vermont Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; has been an artist-in-residence twice at both Vermont Studio Center and Pilchuck Glass School; and has curated or exhibited in numerous museums and galleries, including the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece; The Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago, IL; DYNAMO Project Space, Thessaloniki, Greece; Figge Art Museum in Iowa; Muskegon Museum in Michigan; Bellevue Arts Museum in Washington; Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan; BWA Wrocław Galleries of Contemporary Art, Wrocław, Poland.
Efthymia Lydia Roupakia
Efthymia Lydia Roupakia is Assistant Professor at the Department of American Literature and Culture of the School of English at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She holds a PhD in English Studies from the University of Oxford, UK. Her PhD and MPhil research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). Her research focuses on issues of multiculturalism and identity construction in N. American literature and culture, cultural theory and inter-American studies. Her publications include book chapters and essays published in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Atlantis, Literature Interpretation Theory, University of Toronto Quarterly, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States and in other journals. She has also co-edited a volume of essays on religion and migration published by Palgrave Macmillan (2017) and the special issue of Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media titled Religion, Mobilities and Belongings (2021).
Foteini Toliou
Foteini Toliou is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Literature and Culture at the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She received her B.A. in English Language and Literature, AUTh in 2019 and completed her M.A. in English and American Studies at AUTh in 2021. Her Master’s thesis focused on Chicana/o literature, hybridity and borderlands theory. She also holds a publication in the journal Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses of the Universidad de la Laguna. Her research interests include Ethnic studies, diasporic and immigrant literature, Chicana/o, Latina/o and Caribbean literature, transcultural criticism, and feminist theory. Her research also focuses on urban studies and on ecocritical readings of contemporary American literature.