Oral history interview with Karen R. Van Dyck, 2015

Biographical Note

Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Hellenic Studies at Columbia University. Her work has consistently had a feminist angle, and she came to teach at Columbia during the first years of IRWAG's development. Her research involves Modern Greek and Greek Diaspora literature, poetry, gender studies, and translation studies. Her first book, Kassandra and the Censors: Greek Poetry Since 1967 (1998) investigated the work of Greek women poets during and after the period of dictatorship from 1967-1974. She has also published several edited volumes and translations, and her current work investigates the role of multilingualism in Greek Diaspora literature. Van Dyck received her BA from Wesleyan College in 1980, after which she pursued an MA at Aristotle University in Greece in Modern Greek Literature. She received her DPhil from Oxford University in Medieval and Modern Languages in 1990. Van Dyck has served as the Director of Columbia's Program in Hellenic Studies from 1988 until the present. She has also served as a lecturer and affiliated faculty member for IRWGS since 1988, and for Columbia's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS) since 2004

Scope and Contents

In this interview, Van Dyck begins by discussing her early life and education. She particularly focuses on her first trip to Greece, which inspired her intellectual pursuit of modern Greek female poets. In 1988, Van Dyck was recruited to begin a Modern Greek program at Columbia University and immediately became involved with IRWGS, both teaching and learning within the institute. She discusses the support network she found at IRWGS, particularly after the birth of her three children. All the while, Van Dyck explains, she was working to open up the Classics department to changes, including its collaboration with IRWGS. This was supported by the department chair Roger Bagnall but, Van Dyck notes, she was the Classics faculty member who was primarily relied upon to do this bridge work. Van Dyck discusses this experience and the nature of this work. Throughout the interview, Van Dyck discusses the differences in studying women and feminism at different institutions, particularly Columbia, Wesleyan, and Oxford. Additionally, Van Dyck ruminates over her generation's place, especially the place of female scholars, within larger institutional history and over the shifts and realignments of IRWGS in recent years. Van Dyck discusses the institute's growing emphasis on the social sciences. She discusses collaboration with the Institute as well as the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society

Subjects

• Columbia University. Department of Classics.
• Columbia University. Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
• Columbia University. Program in Hellenic Studies.
• Feminism and higher education--United States.
• Feminist theory.
• Freeman, Mary T., interviewer.
• Greek poetry, Modern--Women authors.
• Interviews.
• Oral histories (literary works)
• Van Dyck, Karen--Interviews.

Access Conditions

Copyright by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, 2015