PhD Oral Exam - Helen Polychronakos, Humanities (Arts and Science)

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary research creation project that brings together oral history, literary criticism, and creative writing to listen to, converse with, and further imagine the life narratives of women who came of age in twentieth-century Greece. This work is inspired and based on the lives of my mother (b. 1949) and my grandmother (b. 1905). It is book-ended by two landmark events, beginning with the Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1922, when my grandmother, along with 1.5 other Greeks in Asia Minor and 500,000 Turks in Greece, were relocated across the Aegean. The second is the fall of the Regime of the Colonels (1967-1974), Greece’s last dictatorship, which held power when my mother was a young nursing student in Thessaloniki. Political discourse, traditional historiographies, novels, commemorative practices, and many other outputs have sedimented into national narratives about these events. Using the tools of literary criticism and methodologies from oral history, I examine how biographical and autobiographical fiction, as well as oral histories, bring forth personal narratives that rely on, but also resist national and collective narratives to fashion individual life stories. I conclude the dissertation with two short stories that capture the personal and intergenerational inspiration for this project.