Harvard Talk Features a “Reconsideration of the Greek Revolution”

Boston was a hotbed of Philhellenism during and after the Greek War of Independence, with local notables such as Harvard-educated Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, a surgeon, even going off to fight in the Greek revolution and adopting a boy who had been rendered fatherless in the War.

Roilos’ research interests include postclassical Greek literature and culture, cultural politics, comparative poetics, reception studies, cognitive and historical anthropology, and critical theory.

Born and raised in Greece, the Harvard professor studied at the University of Athens, where he earned his Bacheor’s degree in Classics, Byzantine, and Modern Greek Literature in 1991, and Harvard University, earning his doctorate in 1999.

He has been a Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks and was awarded a Forschungsstipendium für erfahrene Wissenschaftler from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2010.

Professor Roilos has been awarded an Honorary PhD from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens. He is a member of the Administrative Council of the European Cultural Center of Delphi and serves on the Advisory Board of the research and policy institute Dianeosis. He is the founder and director of the Delphi Academy of European Studies.

Professor Roilos’ publications and research interests center upon comparative poetics, postclassical Greek literature, historical and cognitive anthropology of premodern Greek culture, medieval and modern literary theory, ritual theory, orality and literacy.

Greek Revolution Presentation Open to Public via Zoom

He also focuses on European aestheticism (with a focus on Greek and British literature), German Romanticism and the classics, and the Enlightenment.

He is the author of the books “C. P. Cavafy: The Economics of Metonymy,” (2009), “Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel,” (2005), and “Towards a Ritual Poetics,” (2003; co-authored with D. Yatromanolakis).