Former visiting professors and past conferences

Information about past A. G. Leventis Visiting Professors of Greek, conferences and resulting publications.

Professor Barbara Graziosi (Princeton) was the 14th A.G. Leventis Visiting Professor of Greek.

Her conference, 'Telling Bodies: A Conference on Corporeal Classical Reception', was organised jointly with Lilah Grace Canevaro and Katerina Stergiopoulou and held from 13 to 16 November 2025 in the John McIntyre Conference Centre, The University of Edinburgh.


The conference was accompanied by 'Martha Graham & Greek Myth: Clytemnestra', an original dance performance that combined classical philology, visual art and modern dance, and included excerpts from the Greek-themed dances of the revolutionary 20th-century American artist and choreographer Martha Graham. The performance was conceived, produced, and presented by Nina Papathanasopoulou (Ph.D., Professor of Classical Studies) and choreographed by Penny Diamantopoulou (Graham Technique and Repertory Instructor).

Dancers stand against a background of a Greek urn
Martha Graham & Greek Myth: Clytemnestra

Professor Ewen Bowie (Corpus Christi College, Oxford) was the 13th A. G. Leventis Visiting Professor of Greek.

His conference, ‘The fabric of Hellenism: Hellenic culture and civic identity in the Imperial Greek world’ was organised jointy with Dr Calum Maciver and held from 16 to 19 November 2023 in the John McIntyre Conference Centre, The University of Edinburgh.


Professor Sir Roderick Beaton FBA FKC (King’s College London) was the 12th A. G. Leventis Visiting Professor of Greek.

His conference, ‘The Greek Revolution of 1821: Contexts, Scottish Connections, the Classical Tradition’, organised jointly with Professor Niels Gaul, was held from 18 to 20 November 2021 in hybrid format, both online and in the Playfair Library, Old College, The University of Edinburgh.

The conference was accompanied by an exhibition in the Main Library, mounted in collaboration between the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and the Centre for Research Collections: ‘Edina/Athena – The Greek Revolution and the Athens of the North – 1821/2021’


Exhibition – ‘Edina/Athena – The Greek Revolution and the Athens of the North – 1821/2021’

2021 marked the bicentenary of the outbreak of the Greek Revolution against rule by the Ottoman Empire, ultimately leading to the creation of an independent Greek nation state. While conflict raged in Greece, Edinburgh was becoming popularly known by the nicknames ‘The Athens of the North’ or ‘The Modern Athens’. This exhibition, generously funded by the A.G. Leventis Foundation and part of Protovoulia 1821–2021 (‘Initiative 1821–2021’), offered the first detailed exposition of the parallels and connections between these two apparently very separate phenomena. It explored neoclassicism in Edinburgh, the key events of the Greek Revolution and the Scots who supported it, and the wider contexts of the classical tradition. The exhibition comprised a large core of historic books, drawings and photographs from the University’s Centre for Research Collections, complemented by an ambitious series of loans from institutions in Greece, Scotland and England.

A striking coincidence

The exhibition began by introducing a striking coincidence. In June 1822, the Ottoman garrison of the Athenian Acropolis surrendered to Greek revolutionaries. A mere two months later, the foundation stone of the Scottish National Monument, modelled on the Athenian Parthenon, was laid on Edinburgh's Calton Hill. This coincidence set the scene for a series of exhibits illustrating Edinburgh’s claims to the inheritance of ancient Athens on the basis of geographical, intellectual and architectural parallels. These included works by the artists Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, Hugh ‘Grecian’ Williams and James Skene, and by the celebrated architect William Henry Playfair.

HCA Calton Hill National Monument
The National Monument on Calton Hill

Scottish narratives of the Greek Revolution

The exhibition’s second theme outlined several central figures and events of the Greek Revolution. Protagonists included the heroines Laskarina Bouboulina and Manto Mavrogenous and the poet Dionysios Solomos. The Mavromichalis clan was represented by a pair of pistols formerly belonging to Petrobey, loaned from the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture. Other highlights included Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Greece’s first head of state, Ioannis Kapodistrias, and striking illustrations of important revolutionary events by Dimitrios Zographos, all lent by Her Majesty The Queen. Notably, the first historians to write comprehensively about the conflict in English were both Scots – Thomas Gordon of Cairness and Buthlaw and George Finlay, whose works featured.Gordon and Finlay were both exponents of ‘philhellenism’, or ‘love of Greece’; they and the other Scottish philhellenes were the focal point of the exhibition’s third theme. A selection of Finlay’s personal papers were loaned from the British School at Athens, and some of Gordon’s from the University of Aberdeen. The most famous of the philhellenes was arguably the Northeast-raised Lord Byron, whose sojourns in Greece both before and during the Revolution were illustrated by letters, notebooks and documents loaned from the National Library of Scotland. Lesser-known figures include the Laurencekirk-born educationalist and attorney Edward Masson, the Edinburgh graduate and biographer of John Knox, Rev. Dr Thomas M'Crie, and the radical Edinburgh philanthropist Agnes Renton who fostered women’s education in the Ionian Islands.

The classical tradition and philhellenism

The classical tradition underpinned philhellenism and the language of ‘restoration’ associated with the Greek Revolution. The first volume of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s lavish and ambitious Antiquities of Athens (1762) and a manuscript notebook of Stuart’s introduce the expansion of antiquarian publications in western Europe. These trends of connoisseurship took their most controversial turn with the removal of many Parthenon sculptures by Lord Elgin, officially justified but also widely condemned even in his own day. At the University of Edinburgh, the teaching of Greek was revolutionized by John Stuart Blackie’s spoken method and integration of contemporary literature. The section closed with Dr Sandy Stoddart’s relief of ‘Edina’ reflecting the glory of Athena from his 2016 statue of William Henry Playfair, thus bringing the exhibition full circle to the question of Edinburgh’s ‘Athenian’ identity.

New work

Finally, the exhibition’s anteroom plays hosted an innovative new commissioned artwork, Karen Cunningham’s "Parataxis". Her two-part work comprised a printed textile, ‘Revolution is a Living Language’, and a moving image work entitled ‘Looking and Being Overlooked’. Parataxis brought to the fore the frequently unseen roles of female figures in the contexts of revolutionary Greece and Edinburgh in the age of Enlightenment.

Exhibition catalogue

HCA Edina Athena exhibition guide (3.64 MB / PDF)

Professor Mary Margaret McCabe FBA (King’s College London) was the 11th A. G. Leventis Visiting Professor of Greek.

Professor McCabe’s conference, ‘Re-reading the Republic’, organised jointly with Dr Simon Trépanier and was held from 21 to 24 November 2019. Conference speakers were: Merrick Anderson, Joachim Aufderheide, Rachel Barney, Hugh Benson, Tad Brennan, Charles Brittain, Ursula Coope, Mike Coxhead, Sarah Broadie, Tim Clarke, Allison Glasscock, Margaret Hampson, Ben Harriman, Verity Harte, Brad Inwood, Fiona Leigh, Alex Long, Andrew Mason, Katharine O’Reilly, Christopher Rowe, Barbara Sattler, Frisbee Sheffield, Saloni de Souza, Simon Trépanier, Tamsin de Waal, Raphael Woolf.


Professor François Lissarrague (1947–2021; Berkeley) was the 10th A. G. Leventis Visiting Professor of Greek.

His conference 'Images at the cross-roads: Meanings, media, methods' was held from 9–12 November 2017 at the John McIntyre Conference Centre, University of Edinburgh, and co-organised with Professor Judith Barringer. The ther speakers were François de Callatay, Véronique Dasen, Nikolaus Dietrich, Luca Giuliani, Annette Haug, Tonio Hölscher, Ken Lapatin , François Lissarrague, Mauro Menichetti, Marion Meyer, Richar Neer, Dimitri Paleothodoros, Verity Platt, Vicky Sabetai (Athens), Stefan Schmidt, Alan Shapiro, Adrian Staehli, Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell, Dyfri Williams, Martina Seifert, Arthur Muller, Gianfranco Adornato.

2017 A. G. Leventis Conference programme (61.18 KB / PDF)


Professor Josiah Ober (Stanford) was the 9th A. G. Leventis Visiting Professor of Greek.

His conference, ‘ Ancient Greek history and contemporary social science’, was held from 12 to 15 November 2015 at the John McIntyre Conference Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Conference speakers were: Mirko Canevaro, Federica Carugati, Barry R. Weingast, Sara Forsdyke, Benjamin Gray, Robert K. Fleck, F. Andrew Hanssen, David Lewis, Carl Hampus Lyttkens, Henrik Gerding, Peter van Alfen, Peter Liddel, Polly Low, David Teegarden, Christian Mann, Diane Harris Cline, Vincent Azoulay, Paulin Ismard, Ingvar Maehle, Kim van Liefferinge, Emily Mackil, Claire Taylor, James Kierstead, Roman Klapaukh and John K. Davies.

2015 A. G. Leventis Conference programme (110.3 KB / PDF)


Professor Margaret Alexiou (1939–2026; Harvard University) was the 8th A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek.

Her conference, ‘Greek Laughter and Tears: Antiquity and After’, was held 7–10 November 2013 at the John McIntyre Conference Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Conference speakers were: Panagiotis Agapitos, Dimiter Angelov, Michael Angold, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Roderick Beaton, Simone Beta, Elena Boeck, Stephen Halliwell, Judith Herrin, Martin Hinterberger, David Holton, Marc Lauxtermann, Alex Lingas, Calum Maciver, Przemyslaw Marciniak, Margaret Mullett, Aglae Pizzone, Panagiotis Roilos, Richard Seaford, Anna Stavrakopoulou, Jan Stenger, Alicia Walker, Ruth Webb, Stephanie West.

The conference was linked to an exhibition, ‘Myths, memories and mysteries: how artists respond to the past’, at The Scottish Historic Building Trust, 7 November 2013–31 January 2014.


Professor Ruth Scodel (University of Michigan) was the seventh A. G. Leventis Professor in Greek.

Her conference, ‘What's Greek about Ancient Greek Narrative’, was held 27–30 October 2011, in the Playfair Library, University of Edinburgh. Speakers present were: Lucia Athanassaki, Douglas Cairns, Erwin Cook, Irene de Jong, Pat Easterling, Stephen Halliwell, Lisa Hau, Johannes Haubold, Simon Hornblower, Richard Hunter, Adrian Kelly, Nick Lowe, John Morgan, Andrew Morrison, Damien Nelis, René Nünlist, Dennis Pausch, Alex Purves, Patricia Rosenmeyer, Ruth Scodel, Meir Sternberg, and Tim Whitmarsh.


Professor John Marincola (Florida State University) was the 6th A. G. Leventis Professor in Greek.

The 20089 conference was entitled ‘History without Historians: Greeks and their Past in the Archaic and Classical Age’.

Programme for 6th Leventis Programme (34.06 KB / PDF)


Professor Jan Bremmer (Groningen) was the 5th  A. G. Leventis Professor in Greek.

His. conference was entitled ‘The Ancient Gods of Greece: Identities and Tranformations’.


Professor Terry Penner (University of Wisconsin, Madison) was the 4th A. G. Leventis Professor in Greek.

His conference was entitled ‘Pursuing the Good: Ethics and Metaphysics in Plato's Republic’.


Professor Sigrid Deger-Jalkotzy (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna) was the 3rd A. G. Leventis Professor in Greek.

Her conference was entitled ‘Ancient Greece: from the Mycenaean Palaces to the Age of Homer’.


Professor David Konstan (1940–2025; Brown University) was the 2nd A. G. Leventis Professor in Greek.

His conference was entitled ‘Envy, Spite and Jealousy’.


Professor Brian Sparkes (Southampton) was the 1st A. G. Leventis Visiting Professor of Greek.

His conference was entitled ‘Word and Image in Ancient Greece’.


All proceedings have appeared in the well-established Edinburgh Leventis Studies series.

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