Events Calendar – British School at Athens

Philippos Margaritis, A Greek Lady, c.1855, Th. Theodorou Collection

Book presentation

Victorians and Modern Greece: Literary and Cultural Encounters

The event will feature three talks presenting the book Victorians and Modern Greece: Literary and Cultural Encounters recently published by Routledge in the British School at Athens—Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies Series. The volume examines the representation and interpretation of nineteenth century Greece in Victorian magazines, popular fiction, poetry, and travel writing, revealing the cultural affiliations between Britain and Modern Greece in this period. It reflects on the tensions, ancient/modern, oriental/European, primitive/developed, that emerge from Victorian texts on Modern Greece, texts that become a means by which national identity and culture, both British and Greek, were constantly reconceptualised through their encounter with the other. The volume tells the story of Modern Greece against the backdrop of key historical events, in a time when Greece was struggling to achieve self-definition among conflicting geopolitical interests.

Anna Despotopoulou is Professor in English Literature and Culture in the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Athens, where she teaches 19th, 20th, and 21st- century fiction. Her research focuses on Victorian literature and culture, Modernism, and Henry James. In 2020-2023 she was the Principal Investigator of the research project Hotels and the Modern Subject, 1890-1940, and she participated in the project Representations of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Culture (Princ. Invest. Efterpi Mitsi), both projects funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation. Her publications include the monograph Women and the Railway, 1850-1915 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and books she has co-edited: Victorians and Modern Greece: Literary and Cultural Encounters (Routledge 2025), Hotel Modernisms (Routledge 2023), Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), Henry James and the Supernatural (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). She has published articles on Henry James, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Christina Rossetti, Rhoda Broughton, Joseph Conrad, and Flora Annie Steel in international academic journals and edited collections. In 2016-17 she was elected Associate Visiting Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, and in 2023 she was elected President of the Henry James Society.

Tatiana Kontou is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is the author of Spiritualism and Women’s Writing (Palgrave, 2009) and editor of Women and the Victorian Occult (Routledge, 2010). She has coedited The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult (with Sarah Willburn, Ashgate, 2012) and edited a volume of primary sources on Anti-Spiritualism, 1840-1930 (Routledge, 2014). Tatiana has also contributed essays and journal articles on spiritualism, psychical research, Wilkie Collins, Florence Marryat, the contemporary artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and has co-edited a six-volume collection on Victorian Material Culture (Routledge, 2022). Tatiana has research interests in Victorian literature and
culture and especially in psychical research, psychoanalysis, ghostliness and spectrality, gender, performativity, material culture and thing theory. Tatiana is an external member of the research team on “Representations of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Culture” funded by the HFRI and researched the Victorian Anglo-Greek members of the PreRaphaelite network.

Efterpi Mitsi is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, specializing in travel writing and classical receptions in English literature. She is the author of Greece in Early English Travel Writing, 1596–1682 (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), editor of Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader (Bloomsbury, 2019), and co-editor of Victorians and Modern Greece (Routledge, 2025), Hotel Modernisms (Routledge, 202), Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel (Rodopi Brill, 2008), and six other collections of essays and special issues. She was Principal Investigator of the research project “Representations of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Culture” and member of the research team in “Hotels and the Modern Subject: 1890-1940”, both funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation (2019-2023).

Hybrid event

To attend in-person in Athens, please register here

To attend online via Zoom webinar, please register here