Because of the travel restrictions in place due to COVID-19, the WARP team has found itself with a lot more free time this summer than usual. Many of us are trying to use it as an opportunity to get some additional summer reading done. (I typically bring a lot of books to Greece with me, buy a lot more in the bookstores of Athens and sometimes Argos, but usually I don’t get much reading done).
Some of the team have even started a little reading group to (re-)read some books about Greece. So far, we’ve read Michael Herzfeld’s Anthropology through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (1987) and we’re now reading Tom Gallant’s The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1768 to 1913: The Long Nineteenth Century (2015). Also on our list of books to read (we probably won’t get to all of these):
- Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (2007)
- Johanna Hanink, The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity (2017)
- Michael Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (1985)
- Stathis Grigouris, Dream nation : enlightenment, colonization, and the institution of modern Greece (1996)
- Maria Koundourou, The Greek Idea: The Formation of National and Transnational Identities (2007)
- Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism : mapping the homeland (1995)
- Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966)
We also have our own personal reading lists, and I thought that I’d compile them here.
Grace Erny is reading:
- Ted Chiang, Exhalation (2020)
- Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)
- Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)
- Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (2007)
- Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir (2020)
- Richard McGuire, Here (2014)
- Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (2000)
Rachel Fernandez is reading:
- Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards! (1989)
- Marvin Dunn, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century (1997)
- Bill White, The 2020 Race Uprisings and Archaeology’s Response (2020)
- Megan Gannon, Unearthing the True Toll of the Tulsa Race Massacre (2020)
- Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)
- Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016)
Joseph Frankl is reading:
- Ernest Hemmingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)
- Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (1998)
- Karl Marx, Capital (1867-1883)
- Marylinne Robinson, Housekeeping (2004)
- Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958)
- Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (2007)
- Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal, Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity (2013)
- Teju Cole, Open City (2012)
Dimitri Nakassis is reading:
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism (2020) – recommended to me by two WARP folks, Grace and Bill
- Helen Morales, Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths (2020)
- Gavin Lucas, Writing the Past: Knowledge and Literary Production in Archaeology (2019)
- Laurent Olivier, The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory (2011)
- Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece (New edition, 2020)
- Debbie Challis, The Archaeology of Race: The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie (2014)
- Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018)
- Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016)
(Bill writes about what he’s reading on his blog)
