The 2003 Harvard Olympia Summer School was a four-week intensive course in comparative cultural studies conducted by Harvard Professors Marc Shell and Gregory Nagy and a group of distinguished junior faculty.
The program brought together scholars and students from all over the world, offering an interdisciplinary, open-minded, and rigorous approach to cultural exchange.
The 2003, Harvard program was organized around the wider theme of The Idea of Europe, and undertook literary, historical, and philosophical investigations in the following areas: Theories of Monetary, Linguistic, and Cultural Exchange; Greek Tragedy; The Idea of the City; Colonial Encounters across the Mediterranean; Cultures of Friendship; Comparative Approaches to Modern Poetry; Travel and Imagining.
The program's cross-cultural focus was reflected in the diversity of its faculty and students. The 2003 session gathered scholars from, among other countries, the United States, England, France, and Greece, and students from institutions as far-ranging as Harvard, the American University of Bulgaria, Columbia, Oxford, Berkeley, and Koç University in Turkey.
