Professor Roderick Beaton FBA, an international authority on modern Greek history and culture including the Greek Revolution, will hold the Visiting Chair in autumn 2021. Image Roderick's tenure of the Chair will fall in autumn 2021, a year which sees the bicentenary of the Greek Revolution of 1821. Accordingly, the theme of the twelfth A. G. Leventis Conference will be ‘The Greek Revolution of 1821: Contexts, Scottish Connections, the Classical Tradition’. Roderick Beaton grew up in Edinburgh, where he first studied Latin and Ancient Greek at George Watson’s College before going on to Peterhouse, Cambridge, to graduate with a BA in English Literature and a PhD in Modern Greek. After a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Birmingham he embarked on a long career at King’s College London, first as Lecturer in Modern Greek Language and Literature (1981–8), then as Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature (1988–2018), and since then as Emeritus. From 2012 to 2018 he also served as Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at KCL. Image Roderick is the author of many books and articles about aspects of the Greek-speaking world from the twelfth century to the present day, including George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel. A Biography (2003); Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (2013), both of which won the prestigious Runciman Award for best book on the Hellenic world, and Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation (2019, now a Penguin paperback). His latest book, an overview of Greek history from the Bronze Age to the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution in 2021, is expected to be published in autumn 2021 with the title The Greeks: A Global History. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA 2013), a Fellow of King’s College (FKC, 2018) and Commander of the Order of Honour of the Hellenic Republic, an award conferred on him by President Prokopios Pavlopoulos of Greece in September 2019. You can view a recording of Roderick's inaugural lecture below. Please note that captions are generated automatically. This article was published on 2024-08-01
