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Kyriakos Pierrakakis is the Greek Minister of State and Digital Governance in the Cabinet of Kyriakos Mitsotakis. In 2007 he earned an MA degree in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and in 2009 he earned an MSc in Technology and Policy from MIT. He also holds a BA degree in Computer Science from the Athens University of Economics and Business.

Celebrated by Homer, considered as the birthplace of Zeus by Hesiod, and identified as the cradle of the Spartan constitution by Aristotle, the Cretan city Lyktos boasts an unusually rich literary and epigraphic record. Notwithstanding this record, and the interest of Arthur Evans and other renowned archaeologists in excavating the site, Lyktos attracted only small-scale fieldwork until the establishment of the Lyktos Archaeological Project (LAP) in 2021. The lecture will provide an overview of the history and the archaeology of Lyktos from its alleged foundation in the 12th century BCE to its dramatic destruction by its arch rival, Knossos, in 220 BCE, drawing from the first results of the LAP.

The first Greeks to participate in the affairs of the Ottoman state were Dragomans, interpreters of the Sublime Porte, who were members of the Phanariot patrician class of the Ottoman capital. They rose to the topmost ranks of the administration and served the Sublime Porte efficiently and loyally for many generations. After Greek Independence, Greeks continued the long tradition of serving the Ottoman state albeit in different modes, as ambassadors, bankers, doctors, administration officials. Their influence and rise to positions of distinction was owed to a large extent to their education and personal ability, as much as to the prosperity of their families due to success in trade.
      The second constitutional period (1908-1912) opened the way to representation in Parliament and participation of Ottoman citizens in party politics. The election of the Ottoman Greeks as members of the Ottoman Parliament was the first organized Greek participation in the political affairs of the Ottoman Empire. Party politics marked the dramatic changes in the political environment, the gradual dominance of secular state power and the adoption of the values of nationalism, which overturned the old Ottoman ‘order’. The Balkan Wars had a decisive effect on intercommunal relations. The Balkan conflicts intensified the divisions between Muslims and Christians, radicalised the Turkish leadership and prepared the way for the conflagration of the Great War.

Dr Boura has served in diplomatic posts in Nicosia, London, and the Council of the European Union in Brussels, as Ambassador of Greece to Lebanon, to the UAE, and as Permanent Representative of Greece to the United Nations.
      She holds a B.A. in Literature from the University of Athens, an M.A. in Area Studies from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, as well as a Ph.D. in History from King’s College London. She is President of the Friends of the Gennadius Library.

Dr Lydia Papadimitriou is Reader (Associate Professor) in Film Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research has focused on both historical and contemporary aspects of Greek cinema. She is the author of The Greek Film Musical (2006), co-editor of Greek Cinema: Texts, Forms and Identities (2011), and Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and Global Circuits (2020), and principal editor of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture. Her publications include articles in Screen, Studies of European Cinema, and New Review of Film and Television Studies, among others. She has explored the film Bouboulina in three publications (2015, 2021 and 2022), the latest of which is a chapter in the forthcoming Bouboulina: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Heroine of the Greek Revolution, edited by April Kalogeropoulos Householder.

Roderick Beaton grew up in Edinburgh and studied English Literature at Peterhouse, Cambridge, before turning to Modern Greek as the subject of his doctorate, also at Cambridge – and at the British School at Athens. 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 (1981-88), later as Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature (1988-2018), and since then as Emeritus Koraes Professor. From 2012 to 2018 he also served as Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s.

     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 An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature (1994); George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel. A Biography (2003); Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (2013); and Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation (2019, now a Penguin paperback). All four of these books won the prestigious Runciman Award (through the Anglo-Hellenic League) for best book on the Hellenic world. His latest book, The Greeks: A Global History, offers an overview of Greek history from the Bronze Age to the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution in 2021. This book will be presented at the conference.

    Roderick is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA, 2013), a Fellow of King’s College (FKC, 2018), Commander of the Order of Honour of the Hellenic Republic (2019) and, from September to December 2021, has been appointed A.G. Leventis Visiting Professor in Greek at the University of Edinburgh.

Dr Alexandra Vukovich (KCL, History) is lecturer in late medieval history at King’s, focussing on the history and literature of the Byzantine world, specifically early Rus. A second research interest focusses on the political role of medieval cultural heritage (medievalism) in modern nationalisms and approaches to modern heritage management.

Dr Irene Polinskaya (KCL, Classics) is Reader in Ancient History in King’s Department of Classics. She grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, and emigrated to the USA in 1992. She studied (at Stanford University) and taught (at Bowdoin College) in the United States (1992-2007), and has been teaching at King’s since 2007. Over the last five years, her research on ancient Greek inscriptions has taken her to Ukraine where she worked at several archaeological museums and sites such as the Institute of Archaeology in Kyiv, the Regional Studies Museum in Mykolaiv/Nikolayev, the Archaeological Museum of Odesa, and the Archaeological Preserve Olbia.

Dr Dina Gusejnova (LSE, International History) is Associate Professor in Modern European History. Her research centres on the transfer of ideas and ideologies across the borders of empires and nation-states in the twentieth century. After her book, European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-57 (Cambridge, 2016), her research has centred on the longer-term impact of the internment of scholars from continental Europe in Britain during the Second World War. Her most recent commentary on the Russian war in Ukraine was for the blog History Matters. She is a founding member of the initiative for the University of New Europe, and a member of Ukraine Hub UK Academic Taskforce.

Dr Mariela Neagu is a researcher in human rights and children’s rights specialised in children’s social care. She holds an MSt in International Human Rights Law and a PhD in Social Sciences from New College, Oxford. She has over 20 years of experience in children’s rights from a policy and research perspective, having conducted research in both welfare states and emerging economies. She is a former Children’s Minister in Romania (Head of the National Authority for Children’s Rights between 2007-2009) and former coordinator of the EU multi-annual funds to reform the child protection system in Romania (1999-2006). In the latter capacity she was instrumental in the drafting of the Children’s Rights legislation in Romania (adopted in 2004).

Dr Neagu is the author of Voices from the Silent Cradles (Policy Press, 2021), a book which sheds light on children’s homes, foster care, domestic and international adoption from the perspective of the young people who experienced these types of care. Her article ‘Children by Request: Romania’s Children between Rights and International Politics’ (International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, vol. 29 (2), August 2015) which points out the legal loopholes in intercountry adoption, has been cited in the Commentary on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (OUP, 2019) and by the UN Rapporteur on the Sale of Children, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio (2016).

Abstract: Historian Dennis Deletant holds that World War II ended for Romania in 1989, at the end of the Cold War when the communist regime which isolated the nation came to an end. This moment coincided with the exposure of the precarious conditions in which many children had been institutionalised. As the subject made international headlines, Romania became one of the global suppliers of children for Western families or individuals willing to adopt. The country was regarded as ‘the last reservoir of Caucasian babies’. Early concerns of child trafficking and attempts to protect children inside the country resulted in political pressure on Romania from the receiving countries to resume international adoption. Between 1990 and 2004 (when Romania incorporated the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into law), children were treated as commodities by adoption chains and as ideological weapons by elites and interest groups who shamed the country in order to influence a specific policy. Furthermore, the topic became a battleground between the contrasting approaches of Europe and the USA in relation to children in care, at a time when the country aspired to both NATO membership and accession to the EU.

Drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, this presentation explores the interplay between different circles of vulnerability at the macro (global), meso (national) and micro (personal) level, and also the interferences of non-state actors with state policies in a fragile political context.

Dr Joanna Beata Michlic is a social and cultural historian, and founder and first Director of the HBI (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute) Project on Families, Children, and the Holocaust at Brandeis University. She is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the UCL Centre for the Study of Collective Violence, the Holocaust and Genocide, UCL Institute for Advances Studies, and Research Fellow at Weiss-Livnat International Centre for Holocaust Research and Education, University of Haifa, June 2019-May 2022. She is a co-Editor in Chief of Genealogy Journal. Among her major publications are Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (translated into Polish in 2015 and nominated for the Best History Book of the Kazimierz Moczarski Award 2016 in Poland; Hebrew translation, with new epilogue, Jerusalem, Yad Vashem Institute, 2021); Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, co-edited with John-Paul Himka (Lincoln: NUP, 2012); and the co-edited volume Jewish Family 1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory (Brandeis University Press/NEUP, 2017). Her latest single-authored monograph is Piętno Zagłady Wojenna i powojenna historia oraz pamięć żydowskich dzieci ocalałych w Polsce (Warsaw: ZIH, 2020).

Dr Michlic is currently working on a book project on the history and memory of rescue of Jewish children in Poland, More than the Milk of Human Kindness: Jewish Survivors and Their Polish Rescuers Recount Their Tales, 1944-1949. She is also co-convenor of an international conference on children, war and genocide, which will take place at Munich University in October 2022.

Abstract: Between 2012 and 2021 the ongoing refugee crises in Europe and beyond have triggered evocation of young Jewish survivors from the Holocaust in the commentaries about the plight of young victims and survivor-refugees of wars and genocides in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In my own essay, ‘Mapping the History of Child Holocaust Survivors’, I also argue that the history of child Holocaust survivors ‘can offer a valuable template for historical and contemporary comparisons that, in turn, could advance our understanding of the impact of displacement and the loss of family upon young survivor-refugees of post-1945 wars and genocides’. However, I do not think that such a holistic, educational and memory project is easily viable, despite the frequent evocations of the plight of young Jewish refugees in the current discussions about the situation of young refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. It seems to me that in these discussions, evocations of young Jewish refugees usually have a rather purely emotive character and are vague, if not shallow. Furthermore, there is a glaring lack of historical and contemporary comparisons of young survivors of wars and genocides in the post-1945 period till the present, comparisons that would not only seek differences and similarities, but would use one set of phenomena to understand another.

In this paper, I discuss some public representations of young Jewish victims of the Holocaust that tend to gloss over the more complex and difficult memories of the children’s wartime and early post-war experiences. I explore agents and the broader historical, cultural, and social contexts of the more aesthetically pleasing and sanitized ‘happy representations’ of survival using cultural examples from the United Kingdom. I contrast these with painful self-representations of child survivors pertaining to survival and the reconstruction of post-war family from contemporary Poland. I argue that listening and interrogating the voices of specific communities of child survivors, which are not shaped and mediated by certain hegemonic national narratives of the Holocaust, might enable us to uncover and contextualize difficult and taboo aspects of lives of orphan child survivors. They could provide us with valuable lessons for understanding the short-term and long-term impact of wars and genocides of the twentieth and twenty-first century on child survivors.

Gonda Van Steen holds the Koraes Chair in the Centre for Hellenic Studies and the Department of Classics at King’s College London. She is the author of five books: Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece (2000); Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire (2010); Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands (2011); and Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967-1974 (2015). Her latest book, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? (University of Michigan Press, 2019), takes the reader into the new, uncharted terrain of Greek adoption stories that become paradigmatic of Cold War politics and history. This book appeared also in Greek translation as Ζητούνται παιδιά από την Ελλάδα: Υιοθεσίες στην Αμερική του Ψυχρού Πολέμου (Athens: Potamos, 2021).

Abstract: On 17 May 1946, the American social worker Charles Schermerhorn arrived in Greece. He arrived at a critical time: Greece had just come out of a brutal Nazi German Occupation and was about to engage in a three-year-long and devastating civil war (1946-1949). Charles was appointed by UNNRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.), subsequently by the Near East Foundation, and eventually by UNICEF. That means that, in the course of a mere five years, Charles saw a tremendous amount of American-influenced administrative and logistical planning for Greece, which was a focus of intense early Cold War friction and scrutiny. Charles’ own appointment as an UNRRA child welfare specialist attests to a Western-imported and hegemonic humanitarian model, which had to serve as an antidote to the rise of Soviet-style communism in Southern Europe and the Balkans. The global focus of the time was on children: they held the future of their respective societies and, as adults, would determine whether a nation would align itself with the West or with the East.

Charles’ mandate was to organize food distribution channels to feed especially the children of Northern Greece, the region most affected by the civil war conflict. This was a role he embraced, and he meticulously recorded the details in a hitherto unpublished manuscript. Charles faced tremendous challenges: many of the villages of Northern Greece are located in the most remote mountain areas; many had been either destroyed by the communists or semi-evacuated by the royalist troops. Corruption was rampant, also among the representatives of local and foreign organizations. Charles decries the foreign experts’ lack of experience on the ground and their focus on scoring political points. But his writing becomes a most powerful source on the fate of the children of the rural and afflicted populations, and these are not necessarily Greek-speaking children. Charles tells of pockets of Muslim, Albanian- and Turkish-speaking children, of Armenian children from refugee families, and also of a handful of Jewish Holocaust survivors. His unique account paints a sympathetic but poignant picture of the living conditions of hundreds of Greek children whose basic needs can hardly be met. My paper focuses on these needs, on the local and imported welfare services, on the ambivalent role of the Greek Orthodox Church, and on one idealist’s commitment to five years of feeding.

John Muir taught at King’s College London of which he is a Fellow. He was editor of Greece & Rome for six years, and he has published Greek Religion and Society ed. and contrib. with P. E. Easterling (CUP); Alcidamas: The Works and Fragments (BCP); and Life and Letters in the Ancient Greek World (Routledge). In addition, he has produced student editions of Aeneid IV (Cambridge Latin Texts – CUP) and Odyssey IX (BCP). He was one of the founder members of the JACT Greek Summer School and taught there for many years, serving also on its Management Committee. He has contributed articles and reviews to various journals and has been President of JACT and the London Branch of the Classical Association. For seven years he was also the British representative on the international committee of the Colloquium Didacticum Classicum.

Peter Jones, PhD, taught at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh for many years. He retired early from Newcastle University in 1997 and helped found the charity Classics for All.

Dimitris Plantzos is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He studied history and archaeology at Athens, and holds an MPhil and a DPhil in classical archaeology from Oxford, where he also spent three years as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. He is the author of various papers and books on Greek art and archaeology, archaeological theory and classical reception. His Greek-language textbook on Greek Art and Archaeology, first published in 2011 by Kapon Editions, was published in 2016 in English and is now available by American publishers Lockwood Press in Atlanta, Georgia. His most recent book is The Art of Painting in Ancient Greece, published by Kapon Editions and Lockwood Press in 2018.

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Lydia Papadimitriou is Reader in Film Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published extensively on both historical and contemporary aspects of Greek cinema, including genre, gender, documentary and film industry-related topics (distribution, co-productions, film festivals). She is the author of The Greek Film Musical (2006), co-editor of Greek Cinema: Texts, Forms and Identities (2011), and the principal editor of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture. She has recently co-edited Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and Global Circuits and a special issue of the JGMC on Greek Screen Industries (2020).

Vrasidas Karalis holds the Chair of Sir Nicholas Laurantos in Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies at the University of Sydney. He has translated Patrick White’s Voss and The Vivisector. He is the editor of Modern Greek Studies (Australian and New Zealand). His main publications in English include: A History of Greek Cinema (Continuum 2012), Realism in Greek Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2017), Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris (Brandl & Sclesinger, 2007), The Demons of Athens (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2013), Reflections on Presence (re.Press, 2016). He has also edited the collections Cornelios Castoriadis and the Project of Radical Democracy (2013), Martin Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Being (2008), and Power, Justice and Judgement in Hannah Arendt (2012).

Maria A. Stassinopoulou is Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Vienna and President of the Austrian Society of Modern Greek Studies. She has published widely on Greek social and cultural history from the 18th to the 20th century. She is the author of Weltgeschichte im Denken eines griechischen Aufklärers (1992) and co-editor of, among others, Across the Danube: Southeastern Europeans and Their Traveling Identities (2017). Her habilitation thesis Reality Bites (2001) discusses Greek film in the context of Cold War Greece. In her articles on cinema she focusses on the historical context of Greek film production and the narratives of historicity in Greek cinema in the second half of the 20th century.

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The Turkish perception of the Greek Revolution is an understudied subject. Admittedly, there are good reasons for this. The broader pictures reveal a general lack of interest in the subject roughly until the 1990s, when historiographical production gradually developed both quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Secondly, and despite these changes, there is little divergence between the approaches and explanatory schemes proposed during this first century of the Turkish Republic. These perceptions largely revolved around the uncritical reproduction of the official discourse found in Ottoman documents and historical narratives which, analytically, remained engulfed in an ethnocentric epistemological framework. Not necessarily escaping these limitations, one contribution stands out as a notable exception. This was Fevzi Kurtoğlu’s The Greek War of Independence and the Battle of Navarino, published in 1944. The book was the first monograph based on Ottoman sources to be published since 1858. More interestingly, it puts the maritime dimension of the Greek Revolution at centre stage. While this may not be surprising, given that Kurtoğlu was a navy officer who taught at the Naval Academy, a deeper investigation of the political and intellectual climate reveals a much richer context within which this history was produced. This paper situates this book within its broader historiographical framework, presents its key arguments, and discusses the significance of the author’s thalassocentric approach at a time when this was a faux pas in the Kemalist intellectual and military establishment.

Antonis Hadjikyriacou is Teaching Fellow in Ottoman and Turkish History at Panteion University, Athens and Affiliated Scholar at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University. He has held teaching and research positions at Princeton University, Boğaziçi University, SOAS, the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, and the University of Cyprus. He is editor of Islands of the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 2018) and co-editor of Chasing the Ottoman Early Modern, a special issue of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 7:1 (2020, with Virginia Aksan and Boğaç Ergene). He has published widely in English, Turkish, and Greek on the social, economic, environmental, and spatial history of Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean world. He has two books forthcoming in Greek: Terrestrial Island: Space, Environment, and Economy in Cyprus during the Age of Revolutions (Thessaloniki: Psifides, 2021) and Winning at Land, Losing at Sea: The First Turkish History of the Greek Revolution (Iraklion, Crete University Press, 2022).

The Sublime Porte’s crumbling prospects for recruitment during the Greek War of Independence obliged the Ottoman state to resort to the ‘violence market’, whose most important suppliers were first and foremost Albanian magnates-cum-warlords. However, the Sublime Porte made a serious miscalculation by contracting out the quelling of the Greek uprising to an ethnic group which was not external to the issue. Albanian warlords and mercenaries were at the very heart of the matter and were eager to pursue their survival instincts. They followed their own agendas to the utmost of their capabilities and remained quite unresponsive to the Sublime Porte’s demands. In my talk, I will explore what had happened to the Ottoman military and the central role played by Albanians in the Greek War of Independence.

H. Şükrü Ilıcak was born and raised in Ankara. On the trail of rebetiko music, he developed a serious interest in Greece when he was in college. He decided to pursue an academic career and specialize in the so-called Ottoman ‘Three Nations’, namely the Greeks, Armenians and Jews. He continued his studies in Turkey, Greece, and the US. He received his PhD degree from Harvard University in 2011, with a dissertation entitled ‘A Radical Rethinking of Empire: Ottoman State and Society during the Greek War of Independence (1821-1826)’. His dissertation investigates the Greek War of Independence as an Ottoman experience, exploring in particular how Sultan Mahmud II (1808-1839) and the central state elite tried to make sense of and reacted to the rapidly changing world around them. Currently he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Crete.

The Greek War of Independence marked the near-end of the Jewish presence in the revolutionary lands rendering independent Greece a state without Jews. The memory of widespread massacres would nevertheless persist as surviving Jews from Roumeli and the Peloponnese fled to Ottoman lands settling among their co-religionists in all major port-cities of the Eastern Mediterranean including Thessaloniki. Decades later, the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 brought many of these communities within an expanded Greek state and presented their members with the pressing task of recrafting their identity both as Jews and as Greeks. Thus, during the interwar period, Jews—Zionists and assimilationists alike—imaginatively engaged with the legacy and language of the Greek Revolution in a multitude of often contradictory ways by participating in its public celebrations, drawing inspiration from its slogans, and deriving optimism from its success. Such engagements, however, posed questions to Greek Christians themselves regarding the boundaries of the ‘Greek’ nation and the place of Jews within it. Rather than a means of asserting Greek nationalism and homogenizing minorities, the ‘Jewish Greek Revolution’ proved how complex the transition from Jewish ‘other’ to Jewish ‘brother’ could be for Greek Christians and Jews alike.

Paris Papamichos Chronakis is Lecturer in Modern Greek History at Royal Holloway University of London, where he teaches and researches on the history and memory of the modern Mediterranean. His work explores questions of transition from empire to nation-state, bringing together the interrelated histories of Jews, Muslims and Christians from the late Ottoman Empire to the Holocaust. In recent years, his research and publications have expanded to post-imperial urban identities, Balkan War refugees, Salonica in World War I, Greek interwar Zionism and anti-Zionism, the Holocaust of Sephardi Jewry, and digital Holocaust Studies. He was a member of the scientific committee developing the ‘Database of Greek Jewish Holocaust Survivors’ Testimonies’, and he currently serves on the editorial board of the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique Moderne et Contemporain.

Konstantina Zanou (PhD, Università di Pisa and ‘European Doctorate’ from the École Normale Supérieure, Paris) is Assistant Professor of Italian at Columbia University, NYC, specializing in Mediterranean Studies. She is a historian of the long nineteenth century in the Mediterranean. Her research focuses on issues of intellectual and literary history, the history of archaeology, nationalism, and biography, with a special emphasis on Italy and Greece. She is also a student of modern diasporas and of the trajectories and ideas of people on the move. Her book Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2018) won the 2019 Edmund Keeley Book Prize of the Modern Greek Studies Association, the 2019 Marraro Prize in Italian History, and the 2020 Mediterranean Seminar Best Book Prize. With Maurizio Isabella, Konstantina has co-edited the volume Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2016) and has published extensively on expatriate intellectuals and national consciousness in the post-Venetian Adriatic. Her new book-project, tentatively titled Fragmented Lives, Reassembled Statues: The Cesnola Brothers and the Birth of Archaeology explores the lives of Piedmontese brothers Luigi and Alessandro Palma di Cesnola (1832-1904 and 1840-1914), to tell a story about the emergence of archaeology at the intersection of nationalism, imperialism, war, adventurism, and financial speculation, and to explore the elusive frontier between the fictive and the authentic in its foundation as a scientific discipline.

Roderick Beaton grew up in Edinburgh and studied English Literature at Peterhouse, Cambridge, before turning to Modern Greek as the subject of his doctorate, also at Cambridge – and at the British School at Athens. 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 (1981-88), later 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 King’s.

    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 An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature (1994); George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel. A Biography (2003); Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (2013); and Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation (2019, now a Penguin paperback). All four of these books won the prestigious Runciman Award for best book on the Hellenic world. His latest book, an overview of Greek history from the Bronze Age to the 200^th 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), Commander of the Order of Honour of the Hellenic Republic (2019) and, from September to December 2021, has been appointed A.G. Leventis Visiting Professor in Greek at the University of Edinburgh.

Roderick Beaton grew up in Edinburgh and studied English Literature at Peterhouse, Cambridge, before turning to Modern Greek as the subject of his doctorate, also at Cambridge – and at the British School at Athens. 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 (1981-88), later 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 King’s.

    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 An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature (1994); George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel. A Biography (2003); Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (2013); and Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation (2019, now a Penguin paperback). All four of these books won the prestigious Runciman Award for best book on the Hellenic world. His latest book, an overview of Greek history from the Bronze Age to the 200^th 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), Commander of the Order of Honour of the Hellenic Republic (2019) and, from September to December 2021, has been appointed A.G. Leventis Visiting Professor in Greek at the University of Edinburgh.