PAPER ABSTRACTS & PARTICIPANTS BIOS

 

Participants and Abstracts

 

Sergia Adamo           

Title: “Everything is burning: Re-reading The Women of Troy in Contemporary European Theatre”    

Abstract

Euripides’ The Women of Troy remains one of the most devastating theatrical examinations of war’s aftermath, foregrounding the voices of women rendered captive, dispossessed, and silenced by imperial violence. This contribution explores how contemporary writers and theatre practitioners have re-engaged with The Women of Troy to address modern experiences of war, displacement, and gendered trauma, arguing that the play’s ethical and affective power lies in its resistance to heroic narrative and its insistence on collective suffering.
Drawing on recent adaptations and rewritings by writers such as Anne Carson and Pat Barker, as well as productions by directors including Zoe Lafferty, Christine Evans, and the collective Motus, among others, the paper highlights the strategies employed to collapse the temporal distance between ancient Troy and present-day conflict zones. These strategies include minimalist staging, multilingual performance, choral fragmentation, and documentary aesthetics, which shift the audience’s role from spectators of myth to witnesses of ongoing catastrophe, thereby implicating contemporary political structures in enduring cycles of violence and exile. By situating The Women of Troy within debates on postdramatic theatre, Feminist writing and performance, and trauma studies, the contribution argues that Euripides’ tragedy functions in contemporary culture less as a classical artifact than as a living framework for articulating grief, resistance, and collective survival.

Bionote: Sergia Adamo is Full Professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Trieste, in Italy, where she chairs the Research Centre for Gender Studies. She worked as a Visiting Scholar and Professor at various institutions, such as Cornell University, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, The University of California at Davis, among others. Her research interests regard intercultural relations and the convergence between literature and other cultural fields.

 

Rosy- Triantafyllia Angelaki                       

Title: “Adaptations of Greek Antiquity in Twentieth-Century European Children’s Literature”    

Abstract

My announcement focuses on the reception of Greek antiquity in modern European children’s literature and educational culture as a dynamic strategy for negotiating identity, ethics, and historical continuity under conditions of displacement and trauma. Focusing on Central and Eastern European contexts shaped by war, exile, and political rupture, it explores how ancient myths, classical ideals, and symbolic repertoires were reactivated in the twentieth century to address modern cultural and pedagogical needs. The study brings together two interconnected strands of reception. First, it analyzes how Greek antiquity functioned within diasporic Ukrainian educational publishing, where classical heritage became a deliberate resource for cultural sovereignty. Myths such as Antaeus symbolized the sustaining power of cultural roots beyond territorial boundaries, while Aesopian fables, Olympic imagery, and classical ideals of moral and physical education were integrated into children’s literature, youth organizations, and periodicals.

Through these adaptations, antiquity helped present Ukrainian culture as historically grounded, European, and continuous across generations. Second, the announcement situates this diasporic use of antiquity alongside modern Polish children’s literature shaped by the experience of the World Wars and their aftermath. Here, the myth of Troy emerges as a flexible narrative framework for reflecting on war, displacement, and collective memory. By juxtaposing Trojan figures and episodes with modern historical experiences, authors employ myth as a symbolic language through which children are guided to reflect on violence, loss, ethical responsibility, and the possibility of peace. The Trojan myth’s paradoxical combination of continuity and transformation allows ancient narratives to speak to contemporary anxieties while preserving universal moral values. Taken together, these case studies demonstrate how Greek antiquity in modern European children’s literature operates not merely as inherited tradition but as a consciously reworked cultural code. Myths, fables, and classical ideals are adapted to educate young readers, articulate national and transnational identities, and confront the legacies of war and exile. By foregrounding children’s literature and educational practices, the paper highlights an understudied yet powerful arena in which antiquity’s resilience continues to shape modern European literary and cultural discourses through rewriting, adaptation, and symbolic re- signification.

Bionote: Rosy-Triantafyllia Angelaki, Post-doc, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Early Childhood Education, Faculty of Pedagogical Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She teaches Historical and Critical approaches to children’s literature. She coordinates scientific teams that evaluate Hellenic language and literature textbooks for primary schools in Greece, is a member of the selected evaluators at the General Secretariat for Research & Innovation, and teaches at the National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government. She has participated in numerous research projects from 2004 to 2021 and has received four state scholarships supporting her studies and research. In 2024, she received a scholarship from the State Scholarships Foundation (IKY) to teach Hellenic language and literature at American universities and to explore representations of displacement, exile, border crossings, diasporic communities, and belonging in contemporary Hellenic young-adult novels and children’s picturebooks authored by and about Greek and Cypriot immigrants and refugees.

 

 

Christos Argyropoulos        

Title: “Enemy of Caesardom’: Interwar Anxieties and Classical Reception in Robert Graves I, Claudius and Claudius the God (1934)”  

Abstract

In Roman biography, the figure of emperor Claudius is used to demonstrate the inherentchallenges of the imperial system (Edwards 1993: 26–30). In Suetonius’ Vita Divi Claudii (2.1), Claudius appears as an ineffectual ruler whose authority is compromised by his physical and mental deficiencies. This portrayal is subverted in Robert Graves’ historical ‘dilogy’ (Bemben 2021), I, Claudius and Claudius the God (1934), where Claudius emerges as a calculated and perceptive figure who consciously exaggerates his disabilities to survive the lethal politics of the Julio-Claudian court (Graves 1934 a /2006 a : 108). Although he ascends the throne intending to restore the Republic, Graves’ Claudius ultimately enables Rome’s descent into tyranny through political misjudgements and a fatal lack of vigilance (Graves 1934 b /2006 b : 390).

This paper argues that Graves deliberately reshaped Claudius’ ancient literary portrait in response to the political climate of the interwar period. An author with a solid background in Classics (Gibson 2015), Graves wrote his novels during a period when the totalitarian regimes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were consolidating power in Europe (DeGrand 2004). By transforming Claudius from a symbol of imperial incompetence into a well-intentioned but ineffective defender of liberty, Graves reconfigured an ancient warning against authoritarianism to reflect contemporary anxieties about the fragility of democratic ideals.

This presentation examines Suetonius’ portrayal of Claudius, Graves’ political and intellectual background, earlier popular receptions of the emperor, and Graves’ politically charged reinterpretation of Claudius within the genre of historical fiction.

Bionote: Christos Argyropoulos is a PhD candidate in Classical Reception at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Saint Joseph’s University (Philadelphia). He holds a BA in History and an MA in Classical Philology. In 2025, he was a research fellow at the University of Cincinnati. His doctoral thesis examines the representation of Livia Drusilla in twentieth- and twenty-first-century historical fiction. His research interests include gender, power, and society in imperial Rome, ancient historiography and biography, and their subsequent reception in literature, film, and television.

 

Mario Bosincu          

Title: “Friedrich Georg Jünger’s Remarks on Greek Mythology”   

Abstract

As Joseph Campbell has remarked, after the First World War there appeared a series of literary, anthropological and psychological works dealing with the mythical archetypes fundamental to the structuring of human life: Eliot’s Waste Land, Jung’s Psychologische Typen and Frobenius’ Paideuma. Yet, in his Traumdeutung (1900) Freud had already seen the Oedipus complex as a coercive behaviour pattern, thereby paving the way for Hillman’s conception of human life as the “enactment of mythical scenarios” (Hillman 1975: 22). What is more, Freud conceived of the myth as the means whereby one could throw light on the psychic forces enslaving man and put an end to the thraldom to an “archetypal pattern” (Hillman 1972: XXXVII).

Friedrich Georg Jünger’s book Griechische Götter. Apollo, Pan, Dionysos (1943) is to be placed within the context of the twentieth century psychological analysis of the power of myth. This is the reason why Jünger criticizes the rationalistic approach to myth epitomized by Francis Bacon’s reflections thereupon. Far from giving expression to rational truths by means of allegories and of presenting itself as an instrument of reason, myth, according to Jünger, reveals the numen, i.e. the psychic forces acting upon men. In this sense, Western history is characterised by the advance of science going hand in hand with the loss of the myths preserving the knowledge of the ‘gods’ – the archetypes – ruling over man’s psyche.

In other words, Western man, devoting himself to the technological conquest of nature, has forgotten his deep nature. Moreover, Jünger aims at unmasking the numinous force that has given rise to the technological civilization created by the Nazis and identifies such a force with the Titan Prometheus. The homo faber is therefore a “prometheischer Mensch” (Jünger 1944: 5), a man unconsciously re-enacting the archetypal pattern of Prometheus’ hubris underlying the will to power inherent in the “technische ratio” (Jünger 2010: 143).

Jünger’s reflections thus serve to open the reader’s eyes to the destructive force to which his instrumental reason is enslaved and which is at the base of the overexploitation of man and nature. At the same time, Jünger conjures up the figures of Apollo, Pan, and Dionysus, embodying the sense of measure, the pleasure principle and the overflowing life force that countervail the Promethean and hubristic rationality and that can lead the reader to a form of selfhood opposed to the one extolled by the Nazis.

Bionote: Mario Bosincu is Associate Professor of German literature at the University of Sassari (Italy). His research areas include Ernst Jünger, the literature of inner emigration, Romanticism and analytical psychology. Among his publications are: Autorschaft als Widerstand gegen die Moderne. Über die Wende Ernst Jüngers (2013), Sulle posizioni perdute. Forme della soggettività moderna dall’anticapitalismo romantico a Ernst Jünger (2014), Stranieri in terra straniera. Dal Romanticismo a Nietzsche (2025). He is co-editor of the series L’altra parte. Testi e studi di letteratura e cultura tedesca.

 

Angela Constantinidou        

Title: “The case of “Theater of War”

Abstract

This paper investigates the community-specific, theater-based performances of “Women of Trachis” and “Philoctetes” by Sophocles, at the Manhattan JCC as part of the End-of-Life Project and the Reimagine Initiative, “Antigone in Ferguson” presented at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church and Harlem Stage and the online performance of “The Oedipus Project”. These adapted classical Greek tragedies are examined through the framework of the lived experience of the individual as an actor and director but mostly as the spectator.

Bionote: Angela Constantinidou is a multidisciplinary artist based in Nicosia, Cyprus. She has studied Architecture in Greece, Theatre Studies in Cyprus and Acting in the USA. She has been performing in Cyprus and directing both in Cyprus and the USA. She is the artistic director of the Theatre and Film Ensemble, |(w)in the margins|, that promotes mainly artists in the margins. She is a member of the director’s board of the Actors Union of Cyprus.

 

Gema Dominguez Gonzalez

Title: “Revisiting Antiquity in Modern European Literature and the Arts”

Abstract

Natalie Haynes’ The Children of Jocasta (2017) deploys a powerful, yet unacknowledged, intertext: the historiographical method of Thucydides. This paper demonstrates how Haynes re-imagines Ismene—a marginalized character from Greek tragedy—as a critical historian. The analysis focuses on Ismene’s narration, which explicitly grapples with the problem of historical knowledge, systematically rejects mythical explanations, and seeks the “truest causes” (αἰτίαι ἀληθεστάται) in human ambition and politics. This covert Thucydidean framework is one of Haynes’ central mechanisms of rewriting, which elevates a silenced voice to a position of epistemic authority, transposing the analytical tools of classical historiography into the heart of the mythic tradition to interrogate its foundations.

Bionote: Gema Domínguez-González is a PhD Student on Female Re-Imaginations of the Ancient Greek Heroines in Contemporary Fiction. She is a member of the research project Andrómeda: “Mito y representación: actividades teórico-prácticas de innovación en mitocrítica cultural” and part of the organizing committee of the awarded International Conference Espacios Míticos. She has recently attended other international congresses such as the 9 the International Conference on Myth in the Arts held at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and the 10th Congress of the ESCL at the Sorbonne University (Paris). She also completed a research visit at the ARGPD Archive of the University of Oxford and will visit the University of Exeter in September 2026 to work with Dr. Emily Hauser. She has published two book chapters: “Female survival in the Trojan aftermath: Andromache in the fiction of Pat Barker and Natalie Haynes” (2025) and “La reinterpretación de la Eneida en El silbido del arquero de Irene Vallejo” (2025).

 

 

Andriana Domouzi  

Title: "Euripides Reimagined: Fragment, Myth and the Posthuman in Protesilaus and Laodameia by Haris Sakellariou"     

Abstract

This paper examines Protesilaus and Laodameia (1991) by Haris Sakellariou, a Modern Greek reworking of Euripides’ lost tragedy Protesilaus, focusing on how the ancient fragmentary myth is reshaped and adapted for modern drama. Drawing on the surviving tragic fragments and testimonies around Euripides’ play, the paper considers the dramaturgical strategies through which Sakellariou negotiates the fragmentary status of the sources, emphasizing character configuration, thematic priorities, and the handling of loss, desire, and absence.

Particular attention is given to the figure of Laodameia and to the ways in which the reconstruction engages with posthuman elements associated with the Euripidean Protesilaus, such as liminality between life and death, human and non-human agency, and the destabilisation of heroic identity. The analysis highlights how the play transforms and reinterprets the myth, revealing the dynamics between ancient greek tragic narrative and modern theatre practice.

The paper offers insight into the challenges and creative possibilities of reconstructing a fragmentary Greek tragedy by combining a primarily theatrical and dramaturgical reading with mythographic attention to the surviving fragments. In doing so, it illuminates the ongoing dialogue between classical myth and Modern Greek theatre, illustrating how a lost Euripidean work can be imaginatively and critically re-envisioned in contemporary literature.

Bionote: Andriana Domouzi is Postdoctoral Researcher in Classics and Theatre Studies at the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Athens, with a project on Euripides’Protesilaus and its Modern Greek theatre Reception. She was previously Teaching Fellow at the same Department. She has an Academy of Athens funded PhD in Classics awarded by the University of London. She previously worked at the Universities of Essex, London and Winchester in the UK. The volume Artificial Intelligence in Greek and Roman Epic she co-edited was recently published with Bloomsbury. She adapts fragmentary Greek tragedy for children; Hypsipyle is forthcoming with Kaktos.

 

Rosa Figueredo        

Title: “Revisiting antiquity: Wole Soyinka’s version of a Greek classic, The Bacchae of Euripides” 

Abstract

When the National Theatre in 1972 commissioned from Wole Soyinka (Nobel laureate, 1986) a new version of The Bacchae of Euripides it was in the fully realized expectation that the distance between ancient Greece and modern world (African and European) would be readily diminished. Both Euripides and Soyinka honour the old stories and the old pieties while exposing them to fresh experiential tests of their validity, and both put authority, order and regiment upon trial. But Soyinka’s play shows that the old turbulent energies, delight and excitements, instinctual aspirations and malignancies have assumed new disguises, put on new masks. Having had the benefit of both African and European theatrical traditions, Soyinka forges a unique brand of theatre.

This essay investigates certain political and mythic elements, which, though present in much of Soyinka’s writing, are highlighted in their explicit juxtaposition to Greek tradition. We intend to show that the term participant theatre has especially real significance in Soyinka’s adaptation of this Greek play and that it is not only an intellectual construct. In rewriting The Bacchae of Euripides, Soyinka has made Euripides’ treatment of oppression and religious conflict “relevant” to a new context. This transformation may lead readers to look at both, the original and new version of this play with revived intensity.

Bionote: Rosa Figueiredo is an Associate Professor at the Polytechnic University of Guarda, Portugal, where she teaches English, German, Artistic Studies, and Contemporary Culture. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies, University of Lisbon with a thesis on the Nobel Laureate Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka. She is also a researcher at the Centre for Theatre Studies at the University of Lisbon. Her recent publications include essays on cultural identities and African Drama. She is an active member of several International Literary and Cultural Associations and recently started her work as a literary translator by translating Soyinka’s “A Play of Giants” into Portuguese.

 

Irene Gerogianni      

Title: “Epic as Serial Form: Text, Textile, and Time in Bia Davou’s Work”

Abstract

Bia Davou (1932–1996) offers a crucial yet overlooked case for understanding the epic reimagined in contemporary art. Emerging from early systems-based experiments such as Diagrammata (Flowcharts, 1973–74) and Kyklomata (Circuits, 1975), her practice culminated in a sustained engagement with Homer’s Odyssey. Works like Seiraikes domes 2 (Serial Structures 2, 1980–82) and Istia (Sails, 1981–82; 1983) translated the epic into algorithmic grammars, deploying grids, syllabic breakdowns, and the Fibonacci sequence to generate iterative systems of inscription. Rather than reproducing Homer’s narrative, she disassembled the text into syllables and stitches, reconfiguring its temporality through durational, embodied labour.

Her passage from paper-based diagrams to textile structures marked a decisive shift, aligning systems aesthetics with craft traditions historically coded as feminine. These works resist both the heroic singularity and monumental closure of the epic, reimagining it instead as iterative and processual. Davou’s practice constitutes a material poetics of code, in which logic and myth converge with discipline and persistence. Through slow repetition and systemic inscription, she challenged the rationalism of conceptualism, offering what Johanna Drucker calls a “performative materiality,” where meaning unfolds through time and embodied process.

By situating Davou within Greek postwar conceptualism and global feminist systems art, this paper shows how her translation of the Odyssey into serial, algorithmic structures reconfigures the epic’s form. Davou’s work challenges the heroic and monumental associations of the epic, foregrounding instead inscription, repetition, and duration, and expands our understanding of how contemporary art mobilizes the epic as a framework for rethinking narrative, medium, and history.

Bionote: Irene Gerogianni is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History in the Department of Art History and Theory at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her scholarly work has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and international conference proceedings, contributing to debates on Greek and international contemporary art. She is the author of the monograph Performance Art in Greece, 1968–1986 (2019) and has co-edited volumes on Greek women in art criticism and the work of artist Maria Karavela. Her research focuses on conceptual and performance art practices, the institutional framework of contemporary art, and art’s critical engagement with politics.

 

Georgia Giannakopoulou   

Title: “Modern Antiquity – Building the “Golden Age” Beyond the Battles Between the Ancients and the Moderns”         

Abstract

Based on Building Modern Antiquity – Hymns and Laments for Athens (© Georgia Giannakopoulou, Routledge, Taylor & Francis) and grounded on Nietzschean and first-generation Frankfurt School critiques of capitalist metropolitan modernity, the paper introduces modern antiquity as the hidden element in the dialectic between antiquity and modernity. In briefly dwelling though the centuries-long battles between the ancients and the moderns that gradually highlighted Periclean Athens as the “golden age” with which many moderns compared and contrasted their present, the paper highlights the mutilation of antiquity for the celebration of a socially constructed modern image of antiquity.

Bionote: Dr. Georgia Giannakopoulou is an Assistant Professor at ACG-The American College of Greece and a Fellow with the ACG Institute for Hellenic Culture and the Liberal Arts. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Glasgow on “Modern Antiquity: The Representations of Athens as Antiquity and Modernity” and specializes in classical and critical social and sociological theory.

 

Afroditi Kairaki       

Title: "From Ancient Greek Drama to Contemporary Cinema: Trigger Warnings and the Concept of Safe Space"   

Abstract

This article draws on findings from my current postdoctoral research at the Department of Communication, Media and Culture at Panteion University, where I explore the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of representing trauma and violence in Ancient Drama and Contemporary Cinema. The mechanisms of “safe exposure” found within its textual discourse are analyzed in contrast to the paratextual trigger warnings of contemporary cinema. From the avoidance of representing murders and violent acts on stage to the anticipatory function of the choral odes, Ancient Drama incorporates practices of “safe” confrontation with traumatic content, positioning the spectator as a participant who undergoes catharsis alongside the tragic hero. The article turns its focus to the concept of catharsis as ritual healing within the Asclepieia, which were built adjacent to ancient theaters and served as central mechanisms for relief and re-harmonization within a holistic therapeutic approach.             In the contemporary film industry and within the expanding cultural economy of trigger warnings, the aesthetic autonomy of the cinematic work is increasingly shaped by the regulatory sensitivities of platforms and production companies, often operating within diversity and inclusion policies and accompanied by episodes of moral panic around violence or sexuality. Film studios now frequently employ AI technologies to correct or remove problematic representations in older films, effectively reshaping the essence of their narratives. In contrast, Ancient Drama remains timeless precisely because its narrative has never required technological or context-dependent intervention.

Bionote: Afroditi Kairaki is a film studies professor, philologist, and filmmaker. She works at Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University, conducting postdoctoral research on film ethics. Her interests include postmodern cinema, interdisciplinary approaches to film and literature, and history/aesthetics of the short film. In 2021 she published «Postmodernism and New Hollywood» (Aigokeros Publishers). She has served on jury committees for short films at the Beyond Borders Documentary Festival and the KINO Festival. She is Adjunct Academic Staff, Hellenic Open University, and currently a screenwriter on a documentary funded by Hellenic Film and Audiovisual Center and Canada Council for Arts.

 

Anthofili Kallergi                 

Title: "The Reception of the Plautine Aulularia in Molière’s The Miser: Harpagon’s monologue (4.7)"       

Abstract

This presentation focuses on the influence of Plautus’ Aulularia on Molière’s L’Avare, with particular emphasis on Euclio’s (ΙV.9) and Harpagon’s (4.7) monologues. Molière’s engagement with Plautus is not merely imitative but creative, as he adapts classical comic motifs to serve new moral, social, and aesthetic purposes. Molière draws on the Plautine comedy to construct a monologue that integrates self-referentiality and metatheatrical techniques, thereby enhancing both the comic effect and the play’s capacity for social critique. Harpagon combines the comic with the tragic, functions as the poet’s metapoetic persona and, through exaggeration and metatheatrical devices, sarcastically exposes the morbidity and weaknesses of the contemporary French society.

Bionote: Anthofili Kallergi is a postdoctoral researcher of Latin literature at the University of Ioannina. Her research interests include Roman satire, Roman epistolography, and the reception of Roman theatre in modern European drama. She has published papers in international scholarly journals and has worked as an Adjunct Professor of Latin at the Universities of Crete, Thessaly, Peloponnese, Ioannina, as well as at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Moreover, she was the Principal Investigator of the research project The Roman Background of the Modern Theatre: ‘Menaechmi’ and its Contribution to the Conformation of European Drama (2022–2023, funded by H.F.R.I.).

 

Κaterina Kanelli      

Title: “Modern and contemporary reception of ancient art, artists, historical personages, events, myths and rituals in European literature as well as the visual and performing arts”       

Abstract

Katerina Kanelli has been employed as teaching staff in the Department of Performing and Digital Arts of the University of Peloponnese. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Paris 8.  In tandem with her studies in European literature in Paris and Bologna, she studied in the Performing Arts Department of the University of Paris 8, focusing on contemporary dance. On her return to Greece, she worked as an editor in chief and scriptwriter in documentaries and TV shows. She had been employed as teaching staff in the Greek Open University (Section “History of European Literature”) and in the Department of Theory and History of Art and in the lab of Nikos Navridis (ASFA).

Bionote: Katerina Kanelli has been employed as teaching staff in the Department of Performing and Digital Arts of the University of Peloponnese. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Paris 8. In tandem with her studies in European literature in Paris and Bologna, she studied in the Performing Arts Department of the University of Paris 8, focusing on contemporary dance. On her return to Greece, she worked as an editor in chief and scriptwriter in documentaries and TV shows. She had been employed as teaching staff in the Greek Open University (Section “History of European Literature”) and in the Department of Theory and History of Art and in the lab of Nikos Navridis (ASFA).

 

Dora Kechagia         

Title: "Nobody’s Leda, a contemporary glance on the myth of Leda and the Swan"

Abstract

The myth of Leda, the queen of Sparta that Zeus impregnated whilst transformed into a swan - is a motif widely used in the arts since antiquity. This motif is full of patriarchal classifications: a male who desires and conquers on the one hand and a beautiful, available, and fertile, yet silent, passive, and submissive female on the other. Later, in the 20th century, the myth is used in a completely different way, mainly by female artists, as the overthrow of the previous quiet narrative. Here, Leda rebels, mainly because she is allowed to feel, and express her pathos, that is her reaction to experience - she participates, she suffers, she collapses, she becomes a figure endowed with voice and judgement.

This article follows the trajectory of the mythical character as an artistic and a social/ political material, using as a guideline a text written for the narrative performance Leda, a story about women, myths and symbols, presented at the National Gallery Alexandros Soutsos Museum -   Nafplion Annex (https://www.nationalgallery Alexandros Soutsos Museum.gr ) branch in May 2024.

Bionote: Dora Kechagia (b.1975) is an interdisciplinary writer, working at the intersection of theatre, orality and archival research. Her work engages history, mainly oral and public history, as well as mythology, symbolism and metaphysics. The feminine voice is always present in her writing. She lives and works in Greece. She holds BA in Theatre studies (Athens University), and MAs in Theory and History of Art (Ioannina University) and in Creative Writing and Theatre (University of Peloponnese).

 

Marianna Koukoulekidou              

Title: “Clytemnestra … on drags: Gendered Representations and Rewritings of Antiquity in Ancient and Modern Performance”      

Abstract

The myth of Leda, the queen of Sparta that Zeus impregnated whilst transformed into a swan - is a motif widely used in the arts since antiquity. This motif is full of patriarchal classifications: a male who desires and conquers on the one hand and a beautiful, available, and fertile, yet silent, passive, and submissive female on the other. Later, in the 20th century, the myth is used in a completely different way, mainly by female artists, as the overthrow of the previous quiet narrative. Here, Leda rebels, mainly because she is allowed to feel, and express her pathos, that is her reaction to experience - she participates, she suffers, she collapses, she becomes a figure endowed with voice and judgement.

This article follows the trajectory of the mythical character as an artistic and a social/ political material, using as a guideline a text written for the narrative performance Leda, a story about women, myths and symbols, presented at the National Gallery of Greece - Nafplion branch in May 2024.

Bionote: Marianna Koukoulekidou is a dancer and choreographer based in Athens. She graduated from the Rallou Manou Professional School of Dance (2017) and from the Department of English Language and Literature at the NKUA in 2019. In 2025, she completed her MA in Dramaturgy and Performance at the Department of Theatre Studies, NKUA. She works as a classical and contemporary dance instructor, a certified Pilates instructor, and occasionally as a translator, while in 2023 she was employed as a substitute English teacher.

Both her technical practice and her teaching methodology are grounded in improvisation. She has participated in several dance and theater festivals as a dancer and also a creator, made two short dance films and she has attended numerous workshops and seminars. Academically, she has presented papers at the 2nd and 3^rd Conferences of Young Researchers Marios Pontikas in the 21st Century and Kostas Mourselas in the 21st Century (2022–2023). She has also participated in the international conferences Expanded Scenography, Performance and Public Space (2024) and Performing Spaces 2025.

 

Dora Leontaridou

Title: “Contemporary Theatrical Rewritings of the Myth of Medea: Social Stakes and Cultural Reframings”

Abstract

Contemporary theatrical rewritings of the myth of Medea in the 21st century are marked by a particularly rich rearticulation of its underlying stakes. This inevitably raises the question: to what extent does the myth of Medea continue to captivate audiences of the 21st century? What kinds of bonds are woven between this enigmatic figure of antiquity and the modern world? Despite the millennia that separate us from its origins, the myth of Medea remains strikingly relevant, articulating enduring concerns related to the condition of women, conflictual family dynamics, the experience of abandonment and betrayal, as well as the fate of foreigners and migrants, exploitation, the exercise of political power over vulnerable individuals, and the persistence of unpunished injustice. Through the lens of this archetypal myth, contemporary social issues are illuminated in new ways, revealing its profound human depth and timeless resonance.

This presentation aims to examine the rewritings of the Medea myth in 21st‑century theatre, focusing on the identification and analysis of the social concerns they embody. On the contemporary stage, the mythical figure enters into dialogue with present‑day social problems, revealing and highlighting—through the mask of myth—pressing social stakes, while simultaneously showcasing the power of theatre as both a mirror and a vehicle of social reflection. The paper seeks to explore these modern rewritings in order to bring to light the social issues they convey.

Bionote: Dora Leontaridou holds a PhD in French Literature from the Sorbonne University (Paris III). She serves as Adjunct Teaching Staff at the Hellenic Open University in the Master’s Programme “Creative Writing”. She also works as an Education Advisor at the Directorate of Secondary Education of  Athens B.

Her research focuses on the reception of myths in contemporary dramaturgy and literature. Her publications include the books Pratiques innovantes appliquées pour l’enseignement du FLE and Le mythe d’Andromaque dans le théâtre antique et français.

Her literary work includes the children’s book The Child Who Dreamed Melodies (Papadopoulos Publishing, 2006), the short story collection Of Love, Death and Wind (Ocelotos, 2014), and the play Melanippe (Evmaros, 2016), which was awarded First Prize in the 93rd Kalokairineios Competition of the Literary Society “Parnassos”.

 

Vilma Losyte

Title: “Revisiting Classical Art: The Venus de Milo as a Symbol of Inclusivity”

Abstract

Since the nineteenth century, classical art has often functioned as a marker of exclusivity, reinforcing racialized ideologies and, at times, contributing to the visual culture of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. In contemporary contexts, however, references to classical works—most notably the Venus de Milo—are increasingly mobilized to promote inclusivity and to challenge inherited cultural hierarchies.

A significant example of this shift is Laurent Perbos’s installation presented on April 2, 2024, in front of the French National Assembly, in the lead-up to the Paris Olympic Games. The work consisted of six multicolored resin replicas of the Venus de Milo, each with restored arms holding sports equipment. By depicting Venus figures engaged in athletic practices traditionally associated with masculinity, the installation challenges conventional representations of sport and foregrounds themes of gender equality, bodily diversity, and accessibility.

Beyond public art, the Venus de Milo has also been widely repurposed in marketing and social campaigns as a vehicle for inclusive narratives. At the 2022 Lacoste Ladies Open de France golf tournament, Perbos installed a replica of the statue holding a golf club, as Lacoste appropriated classical imagery to highlight women’s athleticism and question the dominance of male sporting icons. Other examples include the 2018 U.S. advertisement Venus on the Go, which addressed disability and accessibility, and La Venuseta, an ice cream created in Valencia to raise awareness of breast cancer.

Taken together, these reinterpretations demonstrate how ancient art can be reactivated to engage contemporary social concerns, while also raising a critical question: do such appropriations genuinely advance inclusivity, or do they risk reproducing historical structures of exclusivity under new forms?

Bionote: Vilma Losytė is a researcher and lecturer at Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius, Lithuania, where she teaches creative writing. She holds a PhD in Ancient History and Archaeology (Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, France / Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, 2022). Her doctoral dissertation, Play with Gods: Functions and Uses of Toys in Ancient Greek Sanctuaries, examined the cultural and symbolic roles of play in ancient religious contexts. Her current research focuses on the reception of classical studies, with particular attention to their reinterpretation in public spaces, marketing strategies, and communication campaigns. Beyond academia, she contributes articles to cultural reviews and is actively involved in cultural heritage initiatives at the Vilnius Cultural Heritage Department under the Ministry of Culture.

 

Paraskevi Melachroinaki    

Title: “Children’s Reception of the Trojan War in the Third Grade of Primary School: Creative Rewritings and Contemporary Readings of Antiquity”

Abstract

This paper explores the reception of the Trojan War in the third grade of Greek primary education through children’s creative rewritings and contemporary reinterpretations of antiquity. Drawing on classroom-based pedagogical practices, the study examines how young learners engage with a canonical ancient narrative by re-narrating it from alternative perspectives and connecting it to modern forms of expression.

Students were invited to write short texts presenting the Trojan War from Helen’s perspective, focusing on her emotions and lack of agency due to divine intervention, as well as from the viewpoint of a child living in Troy. Additionally, pupils created alternative endings to the myth, challenging the inevitability of war and destruction. The intervention was further extended through activities imagining the Trojan War as if it were presented today via social media, including news headlines, posts, and digital storytelling formats.

The findings suggest that children critically engage with ancient material, questioning heroic and war-centered narratives while highlighting emotional, ethical, and human dimensions of the myth. Such creative and multimodal approaches promote a dynamic reception of antiquity, allowing classical myths to function as living texts that resonate meaningfully within contemporary educational and cultural contexts.

Bionote: Paraskevi Melachroinaki is a graduate student in the Master’s program Creative Writing, Theatre, and Cultural Industries: Education and Society at the University of Peloponnese. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Special Education and currently works as a special education teacher in a public primary school. She is actively involved in theatre, both as a performer and as a writer, and is a member of a professional-amateur theatre group in Volos. Her research interests focus on integrating theatre and creative practices into education, particularly for children with special needs, including those with autism. Paraskevi is committed to combining her expertise in education and the arts to develop innovative pedagogical approaches that support the learning and personal growth of all children.

 

Mario Meleiro          

Title: “Revisiting the classical vocabulary in Ricardo Reis – Fernando Pessoa”

Abstract

For those who have a general knowledge of Portuguese literature, the name of Ricardo Reis (heteronym of Fernando Pessoa) will emerge as one of those who most faithfully interpreted and translated, into Portuguese poetry, the form and content of Latin poets, especially that of Horace, but also that of the Greeks, which led him to state that “there must be, in the smallest poem by a poet, something through which it is clear that Homer existed”.

Thus, with regard to the lexicon, Ricardo Reis revitalized numerous Latinisms, lexical and syntactic, which emerge in his verses and some Hellenisms, with a clear preference for an etymological spelling. But the poet Ricardo Reis was even more creative. An excellent connoisseur of Latin, he adapted many classic terms to the Portuguese language, whose expressiveness is undeniable. In this essay I will try to present some of these terms that prove the influences of antiquity on modern Portuguese literature.

 

Bionote: Mário José Silva Meleiro: Degree in Classical and Portuguese Languages and Literature from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra, MA in Portuguese Linguistics from the Faculty of Arts of the Catholic University of Portugal and a PhD in Linguistics (Historical Linguistics) from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon. Associate Professor at the School of Education, Communication and Sport of the Polytechnic Institute of Guarda since 2000. In addition to teaching, he works as a trainer and researcher. The research area encompasses the study of the Portuguese language lexicon and studies in the field of literature and theater.

 

Irene Moundraki

Bionote: Dramaturg and Head of the Drama, Library, Archive and International Relations Departments of the National Theatre of Greece
Irene Moundraki obtained a BA, an MA and a PhD from the Faculty of Theatre Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She also studied Arts at the University of Milan in Italy. She is Head of the Drama, Library, Archive and International Collaborations Departments of the National Theatre of Greece. She is also a visiting professor at the Departments of Theatre Studies of the Universities of Athens and the Peloponnese. She is the Founder and Head of the Greek Play Project (www.greek-theatre.gr) a dynamic platform for the promotion and study of contemporary Greek theatre as well as Vice President of the Hellenic Association of Theatre and Performing Arts Critics.

 

Des O'Rawe

Title: “Modern(ist) Antiquities: Experimental Documentary and Classical Greece”

Abstract

Studies in the relations between filmmaking and Classical Greece typically focus on cinematic versions of the Homeric epics or specific Greek plays (nearly always, the tragedies), adaptations that range from conventional narrative “blockbusters” to more formally innovative exercises in film modernism. Documentaries on this subject, meanwhile, invariably conform to expository broadcast formats beholden to the requirements of educational utility and heritage commodification.

This paper discusses documentary encounters with the cultural and political legacies of Classical Greece that reject these mainstream approaches by experimenting with formal and expressive strategies to complicate distinctions between subjective experience and historical knowledge.

This alternative documentary practice conceives of filmmaking as an opportunity for personal, essayistic, creative inquiry rather than one which prioritizes the pursuit of objective, detached, ethnographic representation. Bringing to light new perspectives on the significance of Classical Greece in the contemporary world, such films more readily challenge assumptions about how we continue to understand and reimagine that relationship. In the course of its discussion, the paper focusses on the following films: Notes Towards an African Orestes/Appunti per un'Orestiade Africana (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1970, It.); Germany in Autumn/Deutschland im Herbst (1978, Rainer Werner Fassbinder et al., FRG); and The Owl's Legacy/L'Héritage de la chouette (1989,  Chris Marker, Fr.).

Bionote: Dr Des O’Rawe is Reader in Film Studies at Queen's University Belfast, where he is a research fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. His research focuses chiefly on comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of film and screen histories, and his publications include: Documentary Film and Radical Psychiatry (Palgrave, 2024); Regarding the Real: Cinema, Documentary, and the Visual Arts (Manchester UP, 2016), and Post-Conflict Performance, Film, and Visual Arts: Cities of Memory (Palgrave, 2016).

 

Christina A. Oikonomopoulou                   

Title: “Heroes and figures of Ancient Greece in plays by contemporary and ultra - contemporary European French-speaking playwrights”     

Abstract

Our paper aims to identify and interpret the plays of European French-speaking playwrights (Greece, Belgium, Luxembourg, Romania), which are thematically based on myths, heroes and historical figures of Ancient Greece.

In this context, we will attempt to answer the following questions:

-       What is the connection between the francophonie of European playwrights and ancient Greek Literature?

-       What are the motives, at a thematic, aesthetic, ideological and experiential level, that push these creators to refer to mythical as well as existing figures of Ancient Greece in order to create new artistic products?

-       How do they manage this specific source of inspiration and what dimensions and identity does this reception take on in their works at the level of thematic, aesthetic, structural and language?

-       Is it possible to talk about an original and modernist reterritorialization of the ancient Greek heritage?

Bionote: Doctor of General & Comparative Literature (Sorbonne Université, Faculté des Lettres, 1998, supervisor Professor Pierre Brunel). Since 2003, she has been teaching theatrical and literary writings of the world in French at the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Peloponnese. Main publications: French-speaking theatre, Contemporary theatrical writings of the world in French, Volume II: “Maghreb”, Athens: Papazis 2026, French-speaking theatre, Contemporary theatrical writings of the world in French, Volume I: “Europe”, Athens: Papazis 2023, L’identité kaleidoscopique de l’écriture théâtrale de Habib Tengour, Athens: Herodotus, 2025, Cours de Culture et de Terminologie théâtrales françaises, Athens: Herodotus, 2022, Jihad by Ismaël Saidi, Translation, Editing, Commentary and Epimeter, Salonica: Epikentro, 2021, Multicolored Mosaics, Francophony and Multiculturalism, Athens: Grigoris, 2013 (co-editor).

 

Ioanna Papadopoulou & Charisios Efstatiou

Title: “Adaptations of Aristophanes' Comedies in Comic Books”

Abstract:

In the early 1980s the mathematician T. Apostolides and the cartoonist G. Akokalidis produced a comic-book series adapting the eleven surviving comedies of Aristophanes. Although neither was a classicist, their work goes beyond translation from Ancient into Modern Greek: it constitutes an intermedial transformation of a performative dramatic genre into sequential visual narrative while preserving its comic energy.

Retaining central features of Aristophanic comedy — sexual and political innuendo, obscenity, wordplay, and persistent social criticism — the series reintroduced Old Comedy to a wide readership. The “Aristophanic Comic Books” have sold more than 700,000 copies over the past twenty-five years, with eight volumes translated into English, German, and French. The comic book thus becomes a contemporary cultural space in which antiquity is renegotiated and made accessible to modern audiences, especially younger readers unfamiliar with theatrical conventions.

This paper examines selected adaptations in order to explore how an ancient theatrical text is revisited through a popular visual medium. It analyses: the visual reconstruction of performance, the transformation of Aristophanic language, the reshaping of structural elements such as the agon while preserving comic function, and the role of comics as a mediating form between ancient drama and modern cultural experience.

Bionote: Dr. Ioanna N. Papadopoulou was born in Athens. She studied Classics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and then completed her M.A. (in Classics) at the School of Philology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where she also conducted her PhD thesis on Ancient Greek Drama. Her Post-Doctoral Research on ancient Greek riddles was conducted (supported by a bursary from the State Scholarships Foundation) at the Department of History and Philosophy of Sciences of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her main research interests and her publications are focused on ancient Greek (Attic) drama (Tragedy, Old and New Comedy; especially Aeschylus and Aristophanes) and Roman drama (Plautus, Terence, Seneca), but also include ancient Greek metre and music, ancient Greek geography (Pausanias, Strabo) and Open and Distance Education (in connection to teaching Attic and Roman Drama and Theatre). Her monograph “The Antiphonies in the Choral Songs of Aeschylus” (Athens 2006, in Greek) has been awarded by the Academy of Athens. Since December of 2019, she is a faculty member of the University of the Peloponnese-The Theatre Studies Department as a Tenured Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek and Latin Literature and Theatre. Furthermore, she is a member of the Organizing and the Scientific Committee and also an instructor at the Summer School “The Ancient Greek Drama as Performance Art” (Faculty of Greek Philology- Democritus University of Thrace), and she is a reviewer and member of the Editorial Board of international scientific journals on civilization and theatre. As a scientific advisor, she has collaborated in the performance of Greek dramas and the composition of play texts.

Charisios Efstathiou holds a PhD in Ancient Greek Philology from the Democritus University of Thrace and is currently preparing a commented edition of Aristophanes’ Wasps. His research focuses on stage directions in Aristophanic and Senecan drama and on the relationship between dramatic text and performance practice.

 

Chiara Protani                     

Title: “The Unburied Body of Polyneices: Resonances of Classical Theatre in Contemporary Literature”    

Abstract

This paper situates itself within the field of critical studies on contemporary rewritings and adaptations of classical tragedies and myths, proposing an innovative methodological approach to the analysis of modern reworkings of myth. Taking Antigone as an exemplary case, the study advances a model of interpretation that combines myth criticism—as theorized by Pierre Brunel—with the tools of sociopoetics, an approach developed by Alain Montandon. The aim is to outline the coordinates of a sociopoetics of myth.

Drawing on Véronique Léonard-Roques’s studies on the mythical figure, the paper assumes that modern and contemporary rewritings of mythological characters often function as avatars of an original archetype. The mythical figure is constructed from fundamental mythemes that are reactivated and reinterpreted according to specific historical and social contexts, in order to “reappear, continue to live, be rewritten, and be activated.” The paper thus seeks to demonstrate how this method can be applied by first analyzing the foundational mythemes of the tragedy, and then examining how they are preserved, transformed, or eliminated in later rewritings, depending on the historical and socio-political contexts in which they are produced.

More specifically, the paper focuses on the mytheme of Polyneices’ unburied body, analyzing its symbolic evolution in contemporary adaptations of Antigone as a reflection of different historical and social phenomena. Following a chronological trajectory, the mytheme is interpreted in relation to:

·       unburied bodies left on the battlefields during the two World Wars;

·       exile, with particular reference to the Spanish exiles of 1939, where the unburied body

·       becomes a metaphor for the exile himself;

·       South American dictatorships, with allusions to the desaparecidos claimed by the Mothers of

·       the Plaza de Mayo;

·       contemporary migrations, in which the Mediterranean becomes a site of dispersion and

·       abandonment of bodies;

·       finally, the mytheme of the unburied body is used as a starting point for a reflection on

·       euthanasia.

Bionote: Chiara Protani is a PhD candidate (XXXVIII cycle) at the University of Bologna Alma Mater Studiorum, in a joint supervision arrangement with the Université Clermont Auvergne (Clermont- Ferrand). Her main research interests lie in comparative literature, with particular attention to myth criticism and sociopoetics. Her doctoral research focuses on the study of rewritings of the tragedy Antigone in the European literary landscape, analyzing the meanings assumed by the character in relation to the historical and social contexts and the traumatic experiences of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

 

Maria Scicchitano

Bionote: Maria Scicchitano is a PhD candidate at the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Peloponnese. Since 2014, she has collaborated as a dramaturg with Savvas Stroumpos and the Zero Point Theatre Company. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre Studies from the University of Peloponnese and a M.A in Semiotics at the University of Bologna. Her research focuses on theatre laboratory practices and she has published extensively on the topic. She is also the translator and author of an extensive introduction to Vsevolod Meyerhold: On Theatre (Topos, 2021). During the 2023–2024 season, she collaborated as a dramaturgy consultant with Theodoros Terzopoulos and Attis Theatre for the performance of Oresteia at the Athens Epidaurus Festival.

 

 

Emmanouil Simos    

Title: “Michel Foucault and the Ancient Art of Living”

Abstract

It would not be an exaggeration to say that questions such as how to live one’s life or what constitutes a good life are rarely raised in contemporary philosophical discourse, and that, when they are, they tend to be approached from Kantian, utilitarian, or virtue ethics perspectives. Despite their ostensible differences, however, these approaches collectively form a dominant theoretical discourse that eliminates concrete human experience, reducing it to universalist claims and values grounded in ahistorical notions and entities.

Michel Foucault’s later work on the genealogy of the self can be considered as a therapeutic response to this diagnosis. In the context of his genealogical investigations, Foucault turns to ancient—classical and Hellenistic—philosophy, and, through an analysis of the interrelated notions and practices of the art of living (technê tou biou), care for the self (epimeleia eautou), and spiritual exercises, develops the interpretative concept of an aesthetics of existence. This concept indicates Foucault’s attempt to approach ethics differently in opposition to the aforementioned conceptualisation of morality: it is not universalist, in the sense that it does not prescribe a moral code or set of duties applicable to all; and it is not metaphysical, as it is not grounded in an historical structure of the subject. Rather, ethics is envisaged in terms of self-fashioning, of aesthetic transformation, of turning one’s life into a work of art. In this paper, I reconstruct the conceptual architecture of this ethical stance, and argue that it provides the most compelling response to the question of the good life.

Bionote: Manolis Simos is assistant professor (elect) at the Department of Philosophy, University of Crete. He is also adjunct faculty at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, School of Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where he teaches in the Interdepartmental Graduate Program Science, Technology, Society—Science Technology Studies and the MA in Contemporary Philosophy/Philosophy of Science. He holds a BA in History and Philosophy of Science from the same department, an MPhil in European Literature, and a PhD on the thought of Michel Foucault, both from the University of Cambridge. His most recent publication is “Uncanny Traces: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Critique of the Metaphysics of Selfhood” in The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Technology, edited by David M. Goodman and Matthew Clemente (Routledge, 2024), pp. 302–322.

 

 

Angeliki Spiropoulou

Bionote: Angeliki Spiropoulou is Professor of Modern European Literature and Theory at the Theatre Studies Department,  and Dean of the School of Arts of the University of the Peloponnese. She is also the founding Director of the MA Programme on 'Creative Writing, Theatre and Culture Industries'.  She  has been a long-time Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study-University of London, where she convened the Research Seminar Series on 'Comparative Modernisms'. and recently a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University (2024-25). Professor Spiropoulou holds a BA in English and Greek Literature from the University of Athens; a Master of Arts in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex; and a PhD in English and Comparative Literature also from the University of Sussex, UK, supervised by Professor Laura Marcus. She has given talks and seminars in many Universities in Europe and the US and has published in the areas of Modernism and Modernity; Gender, History and  Literature; Literature and the Arts in English and Greek. She specializes in Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin, Her publications include: Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin, (Palgrave-Macmillan); Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics, co-edited with Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pensylvannia (Bloomsbury);  Walter Benjamin: Images and Myths of Modernity (ed., Alexandreia Publ.); Culture Agonistes: Debating Culture, Rereading Texts (co-ed., Peter Lang,); Contemporary Greek Fiction: International Orientations and Crossings (co-ed., Athens: Alexandreia Publ., 2002);  and 'Gender Resistance'  special issue of the European Journal of English Studies (Routledge), She has contributed to many volumes on modernism, such as, 1922: History, Culture, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Sentencing Orlando (Edinburgh University Press) as well as The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism and to journals such as PMLA. She is Member of the Advisory Committee of ECHIC and Executive Committee Member of ESCL.

 

Alicia Stallings

Title: “Poetry Reading”

Bionote: A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile (1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement.

Stallings’s poetry is known for its ingenuity, wit, and dexterous use of classical allusion and forms to illuminate contemporary life. In interviews, Stallings has spoken about the influence of classical authors on her own work: “The ancients taught me how to sound modern,” she told Forbes magazine. “They showed me that technique was not the enemy of urgency, but the instrument.”

Stallings's latest verse translation is the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019), in an illustrated edition with Paul Dry Books, and her latest volume of poetry is a selected poems, This Afterlife (2022, FSG). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos.

 

Vasilis Stavrou         

Title: “Art Imitates History: The Wife of Candaules Re-Imagined”

Abstract

The wife of Candaules, king of Lydia in the early 7th century BCE, is an iconic figure distinguished for her determination in defending her sexual integrity when her husband presented—against her will - her naked body to his confidant, Gyges. This episode is recounted by Herodotus in his Histories, and since then the queen has been a source of inspiration for painters such as William Etty (1787-1849), who captured the event in the most emblematic way in his painting entitled "Candaules, King of Lydia, secretly shows his wife to Gyges as she goes to bed" (1820). This paper attempts a critical analysis of the two works, raising issues concerning the representation of the female body, the role of the male gaze, and the position of women in history over time. It explores the extent to which historical approaches to gender have evolved and examines the reception of ancient Greek sexual morality in the painting of Victorian England.

Bionote: Vasilis Stavrou is a graduate student (2025) in the Department of Philology at the University of Athens, specializing in Classics. His interests focus mainly on ancient historiography, epic poetry and literary theory (with an emphasis on New Historicism, Post-structualism and Gender Criticism).

 

Caterina Stefanaki

Title: “The presence of Minotaur in the 20 th century avant-garde”

Abstract

The 20 th century avant-garde artist seeks inspiration in dark labyrinths dominated by the Minotaur, absolute protagonist of this emblematic fantasy landscape. This mythical hybrid of human and animal descent, becomes the expression of a primitive Dionysian spirit opposed to the Athenian Logos. He inspires the title of the Minotaur magazine, a forum for expression of the surrealist movement (1933-1939). The magazine reflects the broad cultural and geographical reach of the movement and aims to highlight avant- garde artistic works.

Famous artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Salvator Dali, René Magritte, Max Ernst, André Masson illustrate its covers. Picasso is the painter who develops an obsessive preference for the mythical creature during the 1930s making him the protagonist of this creative period and captures him in a number of variations in various paintings and engravings, such as those in the Vollard series (La Suite Vollard, 1930/1937).

The double nature of the Minotaur between human and animal, fascinated painters and writers who reject pre-war rationalism and seek a new interpretation of the world and human identity. The artists are now inspired by archaic knowledge and instincts linked to the mythical monster that lurks in the depths of the Labyrinth bearing all kinds of human passions. Sometimes scared and fragile, sometimes an unbridled demon, the mythical creature who straddles human civilization and primitive anarchy, now sidelines Theseus and becomes the absolute protagonist of a Labyrinth that resembles the human subconscious. Finally, his kinship with primordial autonomous women who fascinate with their dark powers and defy the limits of moral and social conventions, consolidates his presence in the currents of the avant-garde that seek the rupture and reorientation of Western thought and creation.

Bionote: Caterina Stefanaki is a graduate of the departments of Philology, as well as French Language and Philology of the National Kapodistrian University of Athens. She holds a PhD in French, Francophone and Comparative Literature from the University of Bordeaux III-Montaigne. She is a member of the teaching staff in the Department of French Language and Literature of the NKUA specialized in French and Comparative Literature. Her research interests focus on French, Francophone and Comparative literature, the genesis and evolution of literary myths, ancient mythologies, fairy tales, the study of fantasy and symbols and 20th century theatre.

 

Savvas Stroumpos

Bionote: Savvas Stroumpos was born in 1979 in Athens. He graduated from the drama school of the National Theatre of Greece (2002). He has an MA with Merit from the department of Theatre Practice, University of Exeter, UK, where he studied with Phillip Zarrilli  (2003). Since 2003 he has been collaborating permanently with Attis Theatre and Theodoros Terzopoulos as an actor, associate director and training instructor.

He is the main instructor of The Method of Theodoros Terzopoulos “The Return of Dionysus”, leading numerous workshops in theatre Academies, theatres and festivals worldwide. Since 2013 he is leading the international workshop of the Method in Attis Theatre, Athens, which takes place twice per year. The participants of the workshop are theatre students, actors and performers from all around the world.

 

Melania Torok                     

Title: “New Woman, New Amazon: Changing Depictions in Classical and Feminist Literature”    

Abstract

My paper aims to investigate the way New Woman ideas influenced the reception of the classical image of the Amazons into early feminist literature, and the way literary depictions of matriarchal societies changed from antiquity to the early twentieth century. First-wave feminist authors such as Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, Mary E. Bradley Lane, Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett and others worked to lift the Amazons out of the confines of mythological prehistory, where they had been relegated by nineteenth-century readings, and bring them into modernity, attempting to reconcile the images of the ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’ woman of both antiquity and the fin de siècle by imagining utopistic societies ruled entirely by women. By contrasting the depictions of Amazonian matriarchy from antiquity with those in early feminist literature, we can observe a number of distinct characteristics of New Woman thought in these texts, from the way they build on women’s travel writing to advocating for the rational dress movement, marriage equality, and above all, women's suffrage. The paper will examine the way the above authors subvert the classical image of the Amazons under the influence of modern feminist thought in order to further the argument for women’s political advancement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Bionote: Melania Torok is a first-year PhD student reading Comparative Literature at SELCS-CMII, University College London. Her principal research interests are concerned with the intersection of feminist and classical literature. She is particularly interested in the way women’s power – especially political power – is portrayed in classical works, how these depictions influenced the role of women in politics throughout the ages, and how feminist literature has been working to subvert these often-pejorative historical depictions.

 

Sophia Tsatsou - Nikolouli              

Title: “Antigone by Sophocles: Contemporary Readings and Creative Approaches”

Abstract

Sophocles’ Antigone continues to resonate through time, inviting readers and audiences to reflect on the tensions between individual conscience and societal rules. In the original play, Antigone stands against established authority, defending the unwritten, eternal laws of the gods, and in doing so, embodies moral and existential conflicts that still feel strikingly relevant. Later reinterpretations, such as Jean Anouilh’s and Bertolt Brecht’s versions, show how this central struggle can be reframed in different historical and social contexts. Anouilh’s Antigone emphasizes existential questions of choice and fate, while Brecht’s approach highlights the social and political dimensions of defiance. Meanwhile, María Zambrano’s philosophical essay “The Tomb of Antigone” brings a reflective lens, connecting her actions to conscience, ethical responsibility and the weight of moral decision-making.

Creative writing builds on this legacy, allowing the myth to live and breathe in new ways. Through rewriting, Antigone can be placed in contemporary settings, where conflicts take on fresh shapes and spark dialogue about modern moral, social and personal challenges. At the same time, the essence of the ancient tragedy—the courage, the tension, the ethical struggle—remains intact. This process shows that myths are not static relics but living frameworks, open to reinterpretation and creative exploration. By engaging with Antigone creatively, we are invited to bridge past and present, to see how timeless questions about duty, justice and conscience continue to shape our world. It encourages us to reflect, to imagine alternative perspectives and to explore how ancient narratives can inspire contemporary thinking, artistic expression and meaningful discussion about values that transcend time.

Bionote: Sofia Tsatsou-Nikolouli is a teacher and educator. She has worked as an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Preschool Education of the University of Thessaly and currently teaches the course of Educational Psychology at ASPAITE Thessaloniki (the School of Pedagogical and Technological Education). Her doctoral research focused on creative writing and social learning skills. Her postdoctoral research seeks to highlight the enhancement of soft skills in primary school through the role of creative reading and writing. She has participated in Greek and international conferences, and her papers have been published in Greek and international journals. She has served as a Level II Trainer for the New Curricula of the Institute of Educational Policy (I.E.P.) and in the Intensive Training Program for Educators in Distance Learning. She is the author of 5 children’s books, and 3 of her academic textbooks have been included in the & national distribution system for university textbooks.

 

Szuszanna Varga

Bionote: Zsuzsanna Varga is Senior  Lecturer  in the Political & International Studies of Glasgow University and Affiliate in Comparative Literature and Translation at the School of Modern Languages & Cultures.
She took her undergraduate degrees in Hungarian, English and Portuguese at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.  She completed her PhD in the Department of English Literature at Edinburgh University, and then took an MSc in Library and Information Studies at Stratchlyde. She has  worked at Essex University, the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (London); Glasgow University, and De Montfort University. She was appointed Lecturer in Hungarian Studies at Glasgow University in 2008. Ηer  research interests focus around the concept of ‘travel:’ travel writing, reception studies, publishing history, and any cultural, literary and historical aspect of Hungarian studies. She has been  President of ESCL since 2024.

 

Nikoletta Zampaki   

Title: “Botanical Imaginaries in Ancient Greek and Modern Greek Lyric Poetry (20th ce.)”

Abstract:

This presentation proposes the novel framework of “Plant Phenomenology,” tracing a lineage from Aristotelian botany to modern environmental thought. It is grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, specifically his concepts of “chiasm” and “the flesh of the world.” Applying this framework within Comparative Literature, the study examines Ancient and Modern Greek lyric poetry to demonstrate a poetic ‘dialogue’ that bridges historical eras. It investigates a distinctly plant embodied experience within the lyric form, advocating for a phenomenological reading of plants as agential beings (who) rather than passive objects (what).

Through a comparative analysis of plant poetics in Sappho’s Fragments and the “Gloria” section of Odysseas Elytis’s The Axion Esti, this presentation illuminates contrasting human- nonhuman relationships: Sappho’s queer ecological perspective and Elytis’s solar- centric vision. Ultimately, this research offers a new phenomenological lens for interpreting the vegetal world in literature, suggesting that lyricism itself can become a conduit for perceptions of life that extend beyond the poetic.

Bionote: Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Philology of the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. Her disciplines are Comparative Literature, Environmental Humanities, Posthumanities and Digital Humanities. She is author of The Biocosmic Perception of the Poet. Nature Greek) and co-edited with Professor Peggy Karpouzou the edition Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art. Towards Theory and Practice (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2023). She is Associate and Managing Editor in the scientific journal Ecokritike and member of the Education Team of V.I.N.E. at Glenn Research Center of NASA. She is Series Editor of the “Exeter Studies in Environmental Humanities. Past, Present and Future Econarratives” at University of Exeter Press and “Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures” at Bloomsbury.

 

Christina Zoniou

Title: “From Tragedy to Action: Antigone as political technology of participation”

Abstract

The proposed presentation articulates a theoretical and practical approach to Sophocles’ Antigone as a theatre of citizens and as a field of applied/social theatre, grounded in a long-standing research and artistic practice with an emphasis on the collective invention of the social imaginary. Antigone is approached here not as a normative “classical” work, but as a radically political event, in which what Cornelius Castoriadis defines as social imaginary institution is condensed: the conflict between the heteronomous determination of law and tradition and the possibility of society to reflect upon and re-institute its meanings.

At the same time, in dialogue with Hannah Arendt, tragedy is conceived as a public space of visibility and action, where speech and action constitute a temporary community of citizens. Within this framework, contemporary re-inscriptions of Antigone through Forum Theatre and applied / social theatre shift the emphasis from representation to participation, from the spectator to the “spect-actor,” and from the actor to the citizen-actor.

The presentation draws on examples from my ongoing artistic research, which includes intercultural applications of Antigone in India (with residents of remote rural communities in the Ganges Delta in West Bengal, 2019; with adolescent girls and boys in Assam, 2024), in Turkey (with educators in Ankara, 2025), and in Greece (with young actors at the International Summer School of Ancient Drama at the Lyceum of Epidaurus, 2018; with secondary-school students in Argolida, 2019; with citizens at the Second Ancient Theatre of Larissa, 2025). These applications were implemented in collaboration with the applied theatre artists Nikos Govas, Sanjoy and Sima Ganguly, among others, and with the organisations Jana Sanskriti (India), the Contemporary Drama Association (Turkey), the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, the Thessalian Theatre, and the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of the Peloponnese.

Through this ongoing artistic research, the aim is to demonstrate how ancient drama can function as a contemporary political technology of participation, activating processes of collective imagination, resistance, and democratic action across different socio-political and cultural contexts.

Bionote: Christina Zoniou is a theatre scholar, director, researcher, and practitioner of applied theatre. Since 2005, she has taught Acting, Stage Practice, and Social/Applied Theatre at undergraduate and postgraduate levels as a tenured faculty member of the Special Teaching Staff of the Department of Theatre Studies, School of Fine Arts, University of the Peloponnese, and collaborates with the department’s MA programme in Creative Writing. She also collaborates with the MA programme of the Department of Theatre Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and has served as a visiting professor at the Universities of Pisa, Sapienza University of Rome, and Gelisim University in Istanbul. She is a scientific advisor and trainer for the decade-long programme It Could Be Me – It Could Be You (Hellenic Network for Theatre in Education & UNHCR Greece). She participates in the international research group Performing Space and in numerous international research projects, has co-edited five books, and has authored more than fifty scholarly publications. She studied Theatre Studies in Athens and Glasgow, dramaturgy and directing in Italy, and holds a PhD from the University of Thessaly, specialising in Theatre of the Oppressed and Intercultural Education.

 

Metka Zupančič                   

Title: “Hélène Cixous Deconstructing Oresteia in her 1994 Play La Ville Parjure ou le Réveil des Érinyes”

Abstract

In her 1994 play La Ville Parjure ou le Réveil des Érinyes that has not lost its critical edge, Hélène Cixous integrates the issues surrounding contaminated blood affair in the 1990’s France, in her treatment of the dystopian patriarchal “City” such as inherited from the Greeks, in particular through Aeschylus’s Oresteia and the dismantling, in ancient Athens, of the power of Erinyes to defend the archetypal maternal principle. Never before in her theatrical texts has Cixous deconstructed the mythical material from the Greek lore in such an innovative manner, offering her uncanny solutions to problems that have haunted humanity for thousands of years. In a dead-end situation in this Théâtre du Soleil production, with the bereaved Mother protagonist incapable to obtain justice, not even with the help of the awakened Erinyes, a tyrant additionally creates a flood to wash away all the rebellious marginals. But at this point, a new parallel universe is introduced, with a primordial mythological entity, the Night, the Erinyes’ mother. The latter, helped by the deceased children, now become the rescuers who resuscitate the drowned population and help them find a safe haven in the Night’s abode, an original exit point from the negativities of today’s world.

     Keywords: Hélène Cixous’s theatre, patriarchy, Aeschylus, Erinyes within Oresteia, mythical deconstruction

Bionote: Metka Zupančič (www.metkazupancic.si<http://www.metkazupancic.si>) is Professor Emerita of French-Modern Languages, from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, where she taught for seventeen years after her posts at various universities in the US and Canada and her initial employment at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, her home country. Since her return to her roots, she continues her research in myth criticism in connection with comparative literature, gender studies and history of ideas. She is the author of three monographs, Lectures de Claude Simon. La polyphonie de la structure et du mythe; Hélène Cixous: texture mythique et alchimique and Les écrivaines contemporaines et les mythes. Le remembrement au féminin. She edited five collective volumes, including La mythocritique au féminin. Dialogue entre théorie et pratique. Among the six coedited volumes, the last one, with Brigitte Le Juez, titled Le mythe au féminin et l’(in)visibilisation du corps (2021), was a (co)runner-up for the ESCL 2024 Excellence Award. With Hélène Rufat, she is the coeditor of the CompLit issue “In Memoriam Brigitte Le Juez, a Shared Constellation”. Zupančič also authored a prose volume, L’envahissement (2020), translated into Slovene by Živa Čebulj (Tisto neustavljivo, 2023).