Columbia Summer Global Core in Athens: Curatorial Project

Athens offers a powerful setting for examining how history, culture, and politics shape contemporary life. As a city shaped by centuries of exchange, conflict, and creativity, Athens serves as a living laboratory for exploring questions of democracy and public space, migration and belonging, climate pressure, and the making of modern nations.

Through this immersive summer program, students move beyond traditional coursework to engage directly with place, people, and practice. Participants will blend academic inquiry with hands-on learning, working closely with faculty, local experts, and peers to produce a collaborative curatorial project.

Students in the program will:

• Engage Learning in Context by pairing seminars with site visits, expert conversations, and on-the-ground research across Athens.
• Create and Share Knowledge through the curation of a public-facing online exhibition drawn from a distinctive private collection.
• Build Global Skills by developing intercultural fluency, critical and creative thinking, archival and oral history research methods, and public storytelling techniques.

Offered by Columbia Global through the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative, the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement, and the Athens Global Center, the program covers participants’ travel and housing costs.

To learn more, view the recording of the December 2025 information session.