This network is the outcome of an ongoing synergy between two vibrant research communities working on the culture of Modern Greece and South Europe in the Universities of Oxford and Amsterdam. It was initiated by professors Dimitris Papanikolaou and Maria Boletsi with the key contribution of Dr. Kristina Gedgaudaitė, who has worked at both universities and acted as a bridge between the two communities from the very start of the network.
The network’s website is managed by an editorial team, the members of which are briefly presented below.
Maria Boletsi is Endowed Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam (Marilena Laskaridis Chair) and Associate Professor in Film and Comparative Literature at Leiden University.
She works in comparative literature, literary and cultural theory, Modern Greek literature and culture, conceptual history, and cultural analysis. She is the author of Specters of Cavafy (University of Michigan Press 2024), Barbarism and Its Discontents (Stanford University Press 2013), and co-author of Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature and the Arts (Metzler, 2 vols.; 2018/2023). She recently co-edited the special issues “Literature and Public World Making” for Parallax (2024) and “Greece and the South” for the Journal of Greek Media and Culture (2022, with D. Papanikolaou), as well as the volumes (Un)timely Crises: Chronotopes and Critique (Palgrave 2021) and Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes (Palgrave 2020). She has published, among other topics, on the concepts of barbarism, spectrality, crisis, utopia, and protest cultures in Greece and the Mediterranean. Her latest project centers on the concept of the weird and its contemporary mobilizations in fiction, ecology, and politics.
→Webpage at the University of Amsterdam
→Webpage at Leiden University
Dimitris Papanikolaou is Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Oxford.
He has written the monographs: Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece (Legenda/ Routledge, 2007), There is Something About the Family: Nation, Desire, and Kinship in a Time of Crisis (Patakis, 2018, in Greek) and “Those People Made Like Me”: C.P. Cavafy and the Poetics of Sexuality (Patakis, 2014, in Greek). He has co-edited the special issues on Cavafy Pop and New Queer Greece for the Journal of Greek Media and Culture and the volume Queer Politics/ Public Memory: Essays for Zak Kostopoulos (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2020, in Greek), as well as the new edition of Kostas Taktsis’ poems, short stories, and essays (2021).
Kristina Gedgaudaitė is Assistant Professor in Modern Greek at the University of Vienna.
Her research interests fall within the fields of cultural memory, migration, comics and graphic novels. Kristina holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, and has held positions as a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and Mary Seeger O'Boyle Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. Kristina's first monograph Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture: An Itinerary examines the memories that shaped Asia Minor refugee identity, focusing on the ways in which these memories continue to reverberate in present-day Greece. Her current research examines comics in Greece as a site of cultural innovation and critique. Kristina has taught widely on the topics of Modern Greek literature, language and culture, comparative literature, memory and migration and European cinema and has published on intergenerational transmission of memory in literature and comics. She is also Reviews+ section co-editor of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture.
Yiorgos-Evgenios Douliakas is a Phd candidate in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.
His research revolves around queer theory, far-right and neo-nazism, law and justice. He holds an MA in Cultural Analysis from Leiden University. His Phd project examines the trial of the Golden Dawn as a theatre of justice, focusing on the relation between the law, theatricality, and the media.
Claudio Russello is a Mary Seeger O'Boyle Postdoctoral Fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University.
He obtained his DPhil in Modern Greek Studies from the University of Oxford with a thesis on the influence of modernism in the literary and cultural production of the 1960s in Greece. He also holds a BA in Chinese Studies (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), an MA in Translation Studies (SOAS, University of London) and an MSt in Modern Greek Studies (University of Oxford). His research interests include comparative and world literature, translation, and reception studies.
Periklis Douvitsas is the manager of the platform fairead.net and the publisher of Nefeli (est. 1979).
He studied Composition in Mozarteum (classes of Bogusław Schaeffer and Adriana Hölszky) and was a member of the ACROE laboratory at the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble. Since 2003 he works in publishing (print and online).