My first book, C.P. Cavafy in the English and American Literary Scenes; Authorizing the Other (OUP, 2025), explores how E.M. Forster, Lawrence Durrell, W.H. Auden, Joseph Brodsky, Stephen Spender, and James Merrill helped the Greek-Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy rise to prominence in the 20th century.
The book focuses on how Cavafy’s poetry intersected with Forster’s modernist life writing, Durrell’s cosmopolitanism, Auden’s and Spender's post-war explorations, Brodsky’s meditations on exile, and Merrill’s queer aesthetics. Drawing on published work, correspondence, and previously unseen archival material, it reveals so far unexplored aspects of the texts and personalities involved in Cavafy’s legitimation across languages, genres, and historical contexts. It also presents these literary exchanges as a case study through which to rethink canon formation and transnational cultural validation.
I am a comparatist, and my key topics of research interest include literary appropriation, Cold War cultural politics, and literature’s digital afterlives, including how authorial celebrity is crafted in the context of new media. My editorial work includes the discovery and publication of an unknown theatrical sketch by E.M. Forster, published in PMLA. My current projects include a project on James Merrill’s queer translations, and a second monograph on nonsense poetry, which looks into the redefinition of the genre in light of machine-generated verse. The latter project contributes to broader conversations about AI and the humanities. I have spoken on these topics at the MLA and other international venues, and I have convened the international symposium Digital Poetry / Media Poetics at the Princeton Athens Center in 2022.
My research has been supported by scholarships and grants from Keble College (DeBreyne scholarship), the Onassis Foundation, the National Greek Scholarship Foundation, the A.G. Leventis Foundation, and the Athens Research Centre for the Humanities. As Access Fellow, I lead Keble college’s outreach and widening participation strategy, delivering academic programmes to over 200 schools with limited resources in the UK, building partnerships with the charity sector, and contributing to policy, governance, and data-driven evaluation.
