Dr Katerina Stergiopoulou

Lecturer in Modern Greek

  • School of History, Classics and Archaeology

Contact details

Address

Street

Room 1.10, William Robertson Wing, Old Medical School, Teviot Place

City
Post code

Availability

  • My drop-in hours are: Mondays 11-12 and Fridays 10-11.
    Email me for an appointment outside of those times.

Biography

Background

A native of Athens, Greece, I completed all of my postsecondary education in the U.S. After receiving my PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, I was an Assistant Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College and Assistant Professor of Classics and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. I joined the School of History, Classics, and and Archaeology at Edinburgh in 2024.

Qualifications

PhD, Comparative Literature, Princeton University

MA, Humanities & Social Thought , New York University

BA, Literature, Psychology (double major) magna cum laude, Yale University

Undergraduate teaching

Modern Greek 1&2 (introductory language courses)

Women, Writing, Greece: From Sappho to Virginia Woolf and Beyond (honours course)

Postgraduate teaching

Women, Writing, Greece: From Sappho to Virginia Woolf and Beyond (PG version)

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I would be delighted to receive expressions of interest in postgraduate research on any topic related to classical receptions (especially post-1900) or Modern Greek literature.

Research summary

  • Classical Receptions
  • Modern Greek Literature and Culture
  • Translation theory and practice
  • Twentieth-century Anglo-American and European poetry
  • Modernism

 I was trained as a comparatist and have always been interested in tracing the boundaries between texts, genres, disciplines, languages, and literary traditions. Much of my work focuses on questions of translation, and especially on the many afterlives of Greek antiquity in twentieth-century literature and thought.   

Current research interests

My first book, "Modernist Hellenism: Pound, Eliot, H.D., and the Translation of Greece" (Cambridge UP, 2024), traces the intersection of modernism and Hellenism in the development of Anglo-American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century. It examines how the legacy of Greece, as expressed in lyric and drama rather than epic, was taken up and transformed by the initiators of poetic modernism in English, foregrounding in particular the role of H.D. in modernism’s foundational renegotiation of the Greek literary tradition. My current book project, tentatively titled "Textures of Greek: Cavafy, Quotation, Translation," studies C.P. Cavafy’s practice of intralingual citation. I am especially interested in what attention to and theorization of Cavafy’s quotational practice can contribute to areas of inquiry beyond that of Modern Greek literature—to the study of classical receptions, comparative modernisms, or translation. I am also co-editing, with Vassiliki Kousoulini and Chiara Blanco, "Brill's Companion to the Ancient and Modern Reception of Sappho," to which I am contributing a chapter focusing on the reception of Sappho in American women poets of the second half of the 20th century.

Past research interests

My other work in the field of twentieth-century poetics has been strongly comparative, extending to multiple European traditions, as well as interdisciplinary. In journal articles and book chapters, I have written on the translation of Ancient Greek literature in general and the translations by Greek poet George Seferis in particular, on Carl Schmitt's idiosyncratic deployments of philology, and on American poet George Oppen.
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