Panagiotis Roilos

He has written on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek literature and society, oral poetics, metaphor and ritual, Byzantine literature (11th-15th c.), premodern and modern literary theory, and comparative poetics. Professor Roilos is the author of the books C. P. Cavafy: The Economics of Desire (University of Illinois Press, 2007), Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel (Harvard University Press, 2005), and Towards a Ritual Poetics (2003; co-author with D. Yatromanolakis. Greek edition of the book, trans. by Manos Skouras and with a preface by Marcel Detienne entitled For an Anthropological Approach, 2005). His major publications include also the book Greek Ritual Poetics (co-editor; Harvard University Press, 2005).

His recent articles include: "The Politics of Writing: Greek Historiographic Metafiction," Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 21/2 (2004):1-23; "The Novels of Nikos Kazantzakis: Heteroglossic Narratives and Ideological Misinterpretations" (in Greek), in the Proceedings of the International Conference Nikos Kazantzakis: His Work and His Reception, Herakleion, 2006, 271-93, "Ekphrasis and Ritual Semantics: From the Ancient Greek Novel to the Late Medieval Greek Romance," in A. Bierl (ed.), Literatur und Religion: Mythisch-Rituelle Strukturen im Text, Munich, 2007. His article "Orality and the Dialectics of Performance" is forthcoming in K. Reichl (ed.), Medieval Oral Literature, Berlin, 2007.

He is currently working on two new book projects: on a monograph on the reception of the classical tradition in the period of the Greek Enlightenment (late 18th-early 19th centuries) and on a book provisionally entitled Interdiscursivity and Ritual: Explorations in Patterns of Signification in Greek Literature and Societies (co-author; forthcoming, Saur Verlag, Leipzig and Munich, 2008). In collaboration with Dimitrios Yatromanolakis he has produced the revised English (2002) and the revised Greek edition (2002) of Margaret Alexiou's The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (1974).

He is the Chair of the Humanities Center Seminar on Modern Greek Literature and Culture. He has also established a new series of lectures on modern Greek literature and society by eminent scholars and intellectuals from a variety of fields (speakers have included Helen Vendler and Seamus Heaney) He is a Faculty Associate of the Center for European Studies and of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA). He has co-founded and is co-chairing the research seminar "Cultural Politics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives" at WCFIA. Professor Roilos is also a member of the Steering Committee on Folklore and Mythology and of the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies.

He teaches classes on modern Greek literature and society, on critical theory, and on reception studies (e.g. "The Historical Novel," "Exploring Greek Modernism," "Imagining the Classical and Modern Mediterannean," "The Poetics of the Spirit: Nikos Kazantzakis," "Irony," "Approaches to Modern Greek Oral Literature," "The Poetry of G. Seferis and C. P. Cavafy," "Antiquity and Beyond: Modern Critical Theories and the Classics," "Imagining the Ancients: The Reception of Classical Antiquity in Modern Greek Literature"). Professor Roilos offers classes also in the Departments of Comparative Literature and of Folklore and Mythology.

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