Modern Greek Studies at Edinburgh

Modern Greek Studies at Edinburgh cover the history, literature and culture of the Greek world from 1453 to the present.

This focus represents an exciting expansion of (and the latest addition to) the research and teaching in Greek Studies in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, and was made possible with the generous support from the A. G. Leventis Foundation. 

Teaching and Research

Current research foci are modern Greek literature and the afterlives of Greek antiquity in twentieth-century literature and thought more broadly (Dr Stergiopoulou); the global and intellectual history of the Greek world during the 18th and 19th centuries (Dr Sotiropoulos); post-byzantine Greek intellectual networks and ideas (Professor Gaul, Dido Papikinou, Dr Sotiropoulos); statehood and sovereignty in the Greek world of the Eastern Mediterranean, ca 1800s-1920s (Dr Sotiropoulos); Post-byzantine authorial manuscripts and manuscript culture more widely (Professor Gaul, Dido Papikinou); public history, memory, and everyday life in contemporary Greece (Dr Halstead); the history of the Greek diaspora and in particular of the Greeks of modern Egypt (Professor Gorman).

Honours and PG courses

Our current choice of upper-level courses reflects the variety of disciplinary expertise of our staff: 

  • After Byzantium: An Intellectual History of the Greek world, 15th-19th c. 
  • The Age of Revolutions in the Mediterranean, ca 1760-1860 
  • The Making of Classical Antiquity in Modern and Contemporary Greece
  • *Women, Writing, Greece: From Sappho to Virginia Woolf and Beyond
  • Odysseys: Afterlives of Homer from Dante to the Present
  • History, Memory, and Everyday Life
  • The ‘Dark Side’: Dark Tourism and Difficult Heritages
  • Based on a True Story: Representing the Past in Museums and on Screen

Courses marked with an asterisk as available at both UG and PG level.

Pre-honours courses

At pre-honours we offer two semesters of introductory Modern Greek language every other year:

  • Modern Greek 1 and 2

  • Sovereignty and statehood in the Eastern Mediterranean during the long 19th century: The case of the Greek world (funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Programme)
    • The project is the first step in a wider collaborative project that rethinks how states, sovereignty, and political authority were made in the modern Eastern Mediterranean. Focusing initially on the Greek world, it moves beyond the familiar story of the Greek nation-state to examine a broader landscape of political experimentation: the Kingdom of Greece, the Ionian Islands, Samos, Crete, Cyprus, Greek communities within the Ottoman Empire, and unrealised projects for autonomy or union. These cases reveal the Eastern Mediterranean as a space where empires, protectorates, autonomous provinces, international supervision, and local ambitions overlapped. The project asks how people understood new political concepts, how state building worked in practice, and how institutions created new forms of belonging. This pilot phase will build an international research network and lay the groundwork for a larger comparative project on sovereignty and state formation across the Eastern Mediterranean.
       
  • Intellectual networks and ideas in the Greek world, ca 1450-1600

Team

Dr Anthony Gorman (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies), Senior Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History
Dr Huw Halstead (History), Lecturer in Public History
Dr Michalis Sotiropoulos (History/Classics), Lecturer in Modern Greek Studies
Dr Katerina Stergiopoulou (Classics), Lecturer in Modern Greek Studies

Violetta Alargkof Anagnostou'Constructions of National Identity and Positions of Non-Belonging through the Reception of Greek Myth in the Works of James Joyce and George Seferis'
Anna Coopey (SGSAH doctoral scholar, joint with St Andrews)'Greece Writes Back: Counter-Classical Receptions of Antiquity in the Literature of Occupied Greece, 1941-1947'
Maud McWatters-Reed'Writing Greek Ruins: Twentieth-Century Literary Responses to Greek Archaeological Sites'
Dido Papikinou'Being a philosopher in an age of conquest: Greek educational networks and intellectual life in late and post-Byzantine Constantinople’

Modern Greek traditions at Edinburgh

Modern Greek studies at Edinburgh, like its neighbouring field of Byzantine Studies, could trace its origins to the teaching and thought of John Stuart Blackie (1809–1895), Edinburgh’s eccentric Professor of Greek who advocated the modern Greek pronunciation of ancient Greek. The same could be said for Blackie’s older contemporary George Finlay (1799–1875), the Scottish philhellene who went to Greece during the Greek Revolution, and in fact settled there after 1827, and who is mostly known as the author of a series of works on the history of Greece - with the last volume being an account of the history of the Greek Revolution that remains to this day one of the most authoritative accounts of the conflict.  

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