Events Calendar – British School at Athens

Panel discussion

Writing the Townscape
The city, of any size, looms large in Greek literature and translation from the Greek. This session explores literary resonances of the city in literature from Greece and Cyprus. Beyond the big cities that have long acted as gravity points, cities and towns such as Nicosia and Kerkyra will be discussed as well. The speakers will shed light on temporal as well as spatial expansions of the broader topic of the Greek city and its literary reception.

Panel 1: From Kerkyra to Lefkosia

Co-hosted with the Cyprus High Commission in London

Chair: David Ricks
Panel: Liana Giannakopoulou, Joshua Barley, Nikolas Kakkoufa, Afroditi Athanasopoulou

Liana Giannakopoulou: ‘Eirini Dentrinou’s Corfu: Demoticism and Social Criticism’
Abstract: Eirini Dentrinou acquired literary authority in a predominantly male environment by positioning herself as an authoritative interpreter of the Ionian literary tradition. In this presentation I will try to show how her social criticism and intellectual concerns are mapped on the city but also the island of Corfu. The former is evident in her short stories which focus on bourgeois manners observed in the various soirées. The latter is inextricably linked with her militant stance in favour of demoticism and with Corfu as the trustee of this tradition.
Bio: Dr Liana Giannakopoulou teaches Modern Greek Literature in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics of the University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Power of Pygmalion: Ancient Greek Sculpture in Modern Greek Poetry (Peter Lang) and of The Parthenon in Poetry: An Anthology (in Greek, ELIA/MIET). She has co-edited Culture and Society in Crete: From Kornaros to Kazantzakis (Cambridge Scholars 2017), a selection of papers presented at an international conference that she hosted in Cambridge. She has published extensively on the poetry of major modern Greek writers (Seferis, Cavafy, Ritsos, Engonopoulos and Anghelaki-Rooke among others) and has promoted modern Greek poetry in public events held in Cambridge, at the British Museum, and at the Hellenic Centre. Her current research project focuses on the use of myth in the work of modern Greek women poets. She is the Chair of the Committee for Society, Arts and Letters of the British School at Athens.

Joshua Barley: ‘Athens Tales: Anthologising a City’
Abstract: I will discuss the process of compiling an anthology of short stories about Athens, with respect to my book Athens Tales (OUP 2025). I will try to answer the question of what makes a short story particularly ‘Athenian’. I will also briefly look at issues of translation in a diachronic anthology, and how the English translation can help to draw out the history of the place.
Bio: Joshua Barley read Classics at Oxford and holds an MA in Modern Greek Literature from King’s College London. His translations of Michalis Ganas (with David Connolly), published by Yale University Press as A Greek Ballad (2019), were shortlisted for the Runciman Award and the London Hellenic Prize. His book Greek Folk Songs (Aiora Press, 2022) was shortlisted for the Greek State Prize for translation. His most recent book, Athens Tales (OUP, 2025) was again shortlisted for the Runciman Award. He lives between Athens and Epirus.
Nikolas P. Kakkoufa: ‘Voices from (Divided) Soil’: Cypriot Women Reclaiming the Buffer Zone
Abstract: How does one write the city when the city is forcibly split in half? What does one do with the dividing Green Line that runs through Nicosia, a line we have called a dead zone? More than two decades after Yiannis Papadakis’ seminal Echoes from the Dead Zone, this talk follows the material traces of that echo into the stories of the often-silenced women of this island—Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot alike—as they surface in the work of Cypriot author Konstantina Soteriou. Moving between languages, memories, and communities, the talk considers translation not simply as an act of carrying words from one language into another, but as a form of hospitality: a way of making space for voices across a divided landscape, and of listening for what might become audible when the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are unsettled.

Nikolas P. Kakkoufa is Senior Lecturer in Modern Greek and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Classics, Ancient Studies, and Hellenic Studies at Columbia University, where he also directs the Greek, Latin, and Modern Greek Language Programs. He has held visiting fellowships at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies, and Reid Hall in Paris. His research centers on the Queer Mediterranean, with particular attention to Greece, Cyprus, and their diasporas. His book in progress, A Queer History of Modern Greek Writing (1821–2021), combines cultural and literary history with queer and reception theory to reexamine the birth and evolution of the Greek nation across Greece, Cyprus, and beyond. His forthcoming work further explores queer theory and the Eastern Mediterranean. He is a collaborator on Beyond Island Utopias: Transscalar Narratives of Loss, Connection, and Sustainability on Tilos, an experimental humanities project on the Greek island of Tilos.

Online panel discussion

17:00 UK / 19:00 Greece (1.15’)

Registration link to come soon.