Karen Van Dyck

In 2022, Van Dyck received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens for her pivotal role in translating Greek poetry into English and placing Greek poets and their poetics in the political and literary context of world literature.

Her other honors include the 2016 London Hellenic prize for her bilingual anthology of Greek poets, Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry, the 1990 Stavros Papastavrou Award for best doctoral thesis in the United Kingdom in Modern Greek Studies, and the 1983 Sherman Prize for Excellence in Classics.

Van Dyck’s The Scattered Papers of Penelope (2009), a Lannan Translation Selection, included new and selected poems by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke in English translation, while her translation of Margarita Liberaki’s seminal coming-of-age novel Three Summers has been reissued twice since its initial publication in 1995, in 2019 and 2021 by NYRB and the Penguin European Writers series respectively. In 2016, the publication of Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry, a bilingual anthology that mapped the varied spaces of Greek poetry production during and after the recent economic crisis, moved the argument about translingualism and translation to a new level: much of the contemporary Greek poetry included in the volume was written by poets whose first language wasn't Greek or who lived outside of Greece. The collection won the London Hellenic Prize and was a New Statesman Pick of the Year and a Guardian Poetry Book-of-the-Month. Some of her most recent collaborations include The Light that Burns Us (2021), an edited collection of Greek poet Jazra Khaleed, Hers (May 2022), a translation of a collection by Maria Laina, and a forthcoming bilingual edition of her own found poems, Lifted (June 2022), translated into Greek by poet Kyoko Kishida (Eleni Bourou).

In an attempt to confront the uneven development across cultures and languages, her scholarly activities have increasingly concentrated on translation and translingualism. Her translation practice has taken up the challenge of translingualism: for the bilingual anthology she co-edited, A Century of Greek Poetry (2004), her translations focused on the Greek poetic tradition concerned with different languages and registers. Her task of expanding 100 years to 3000 years for the landmark volume The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (2010) similarly involved much debate about what should be included, the multilingual parts Van Dyck’s particular sphere of interest.

In 1988 she took up a position in the Classics Department at Columbia University, where she created and directed the interdisciplinary Program in Hellenic Studies, until 2016. She was named Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Language and Literature in 2000 – the first chair in Modern Greek Studies to be endowed by a Greek American. She taught for the institutes for Research on Women, Sexuality, and Gender and for Comparative Literature and Society, and was also an affiliated faculty member at the European Institute, and the Sabanci Center for Turkish Studies. She also taught Classics and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan (1992-1993), and Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at Boğaziçi University (2015).

Her guide Insight Guide: Greece (1988) featured a cultural dictionary with entries from Acronyms to Zorba that is still used in classrooms today. Her book Kassandra and the Censors (1998) examined Greek literature under and after the Dictatorship (1967-1974), in particular the crucial role played by women poets in creating a poetics that could escape censorship under the Colonels but could then be used to feminist ends after the regime fell. An anthology of her translations The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding (1998) made available in English the works of three of these women poets (Rhea Galanaki, Jenny Mastoraki, Maria Laina).

Born in New York City, Van Dyck grew up in St. Andrew, Scotland, Palisades, New York, Princeton, New Jersey and Melbourne, Australia. She completed her undergraduate degree in the College of Letters and Classics at Wesleyan University in 1983, and her master's degree in Modern Greek and Classics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1985. She received her D.Phil. in Medieval and Modern Languages from Oxford University in 1990 with a dissertation on The Poetics of Censorship in Greek Poetry, 1967-1990, under Peter Mackridge, Terry Eagleton, and external examiner Margaret Alexiou.

Karen Van Dyck (born January 25, 1961) is an American literary critic and translator. She is currently the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Language and Literature in the Classics Department of Columbia University in the City of New York.