Greek Studies Now:
A Two-Day Programme

University of Oxford, 23-24 May 2025

 

Greek Studies Now celebrates its five years of collaborative research with a two-day event on 23 and 24 May 2025 that reunites members of the network from the Universities of Oxford, Amsterdam, Durham, Vienna and beyond.

 

_{Event poster based on the cover of 'Specters of Cavafy' (University of Michigan Press, 2024);}

_{Original artwork: 'Cavafy Bust' by Apostolos Fanakidis, 2013.}

 

 

Cavafy and His Spectres

Friday, 23 May 2025

4 – 7 pm

Taylor Institution, Oxford, St Giles’, OX1 3NA 

 

Members of the ‘Greek Studies Now’ Cultural Analysis Network from the universities of Oxford, Durham, and Vienna respond to Prof Maria Boletsi’s recent book Specters of Cavafy (University of Michigan Press, 2024). The responses will be preceded by an introduction and followed by an open Q+A session between Professor Boletsi, the respondents, and the public. The evening will close with a wine reception.

Maria Boletsi is Endowed Professor at the University of Amsterdam, where she holds the Marilena Laskaridis Chair of Modern Greek Studies. She is also Associate Professor in Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University, at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). Her research is situated in the fields of comparative literature, literary and cultural theory, conceptual history, Modern Greek literature and culture, English, Dutch, and postcolonial literature. 

Specters of Cavafy: The Greek Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) has been recognised as a central figure in European modernism and world literature. His poetry explored the conditions for animating the past and making lost worlds or people haunt the present. Yet he also described himself as “a poet of the future generations.” Indeed, his writings address concerns and desires that permeate the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How does poetry concerned with the past, memory, loss, and death, carry futurity? How does it haunt, and how is it haunted by, future presents? Specters of Cavafy broaches these questions by proposing spectral poetics as a novel approach to Cavafy’s work. It develops spectrality as a lens for revisiting Cavafy’s poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, as well as his poetry’s bearing on our present. (from the book’s description)

Respondents: Dimitris Papanikolaou, Alexis Radisoglou, Kristina Gedgaudaitė, Tatiana Faia, Claudio Russello, Trisevgeni Bilia, Pria Louka, Artemis Ffytche, and Billie Mitsikakos.

 

Greek Studies Now: A Colloquium

PROGRAMME

 

Saturday, 24 May 2025

9.30 am – 5.30 pm

Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford

47 Wellington Square, OX1 2JF

 

→ PAPER ABSTRACTS (PDF)

 

9:30-9:45 REGISTRATION

9:45-10:00 WELCOME

 

PANEL 1: 10:00-12:00 – PRESS, TRANSLATION, AND THE NATION

Chair: Ugo Mondini (Oxford)

10:00-10:30 Christopher Jotischky (Amsterdam): ‘Theotokis the Epicurean: Οι σκλάβοι στα δεσμά τους as Lucretian Exercise’

10:30-11:00 Trisevgeni Bilia (Oxford): ‘On Translators of Modernism in Greece’

11:00-11:30 Claudio Russello (Oxford / Princeton): ‘Πάλι, the People, the Geography: Mapping Metamodernism in a Greek Journal of the 1960s’

11:30-12:00 Yiorgos-Evgenios Douliakas (Amsterdam / Leiden): ‘Fotis Yagoulas and the Law of Pardala’

 

12:00-13:00 LUNCH BREAK

 

PANEL 2:  13:00-15:00 – WEIRD, QUEER, AND RESISTANCE

Chair: Tatiana Faia (Oxford)

13:00-13:30 Orestis Tzirtzilakis (Oxford): ‘The Woman of Zakythos. Hysterical Resistances in the Work of Dionysios Solomos’

13:30-14:00 Katerina Kalivrousi (Amsterdam): ‘Between Reality and Fiction: The “Weird” Art of the “Greek Crisis”’

14:00-14:30 Elliot Koubis (Oxford): ‘Curation and Method: Queer Kinship and Survival in Édouard Louis and Maria Cyber’

14:30-15:00 Billie Mitsikakos (Oxford): ‘David Hockney, C. P. Cavafy, and the Indexical Impulse’

 

15:00-15:20 BREAK

 

15:20-16:45 KEYNOTE PAPERS

Chair: Constanze Güthenke (Oxford)

15:20-16:00 Alexis Radisoglou (Durham): ‘On German Literature (Written in Greek): Reflections on Aglaia Blioumi’s Αποχαιρέτα την τη Στουτγάρδη, Αστυάνακτα’

16:00-16:45 Kristina Gedgaudaitė (Vienna): ‘Comics, Performativity, Critical Literacies’

 

16:45-17:30 CLOSING REMARKS / NEXT STEPS FOR THE GREEK STUDIES NOW COLLECTIVE

Hybrid session chaired by Elisavet Kirtsoglou (Durham)