Maria Boletsi

Maria Boletsi is Endowed Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam (Marilena Laskaridis Chair) and Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at Leiden University. She received her PhD with honors from Leiden University (2010) and studied Cultural Analysis (MA) and Comparative Literature (BA) at the University of Amsterdam, and Greek Philology (BA) at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has been a research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (2022), DFG-Mercator Fellow at Bonn University (2019), Stanley Seeger Fellow at Princeton University (2016), and a visiting scholar at Geneva (2016) and Columbia (2008) universities.

Maria works in modern Greek and comparative literature, literary and cultural theory, cultural analysis, and conceptual history. She is the author of “Barbarism and Its Discontents” (Stanford UP 2013) and co-author of “Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature and the Arts” (Metzler; 2 volumes, 2018/2023). She recently co-edited the volumes “(Un)timely Crises: Chronotopes and Critique” (Palgrave 2021), “Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes” (Palgrave 2020), “Subjects Barbarian, Monstrous, and Wild” (Brill 2018), and the special issues “Greece and the South” (Journal of Greek Media and Culture, 2022) and “Ruins in Contemporary Greek Literature, Art, Cinema, and Public Space” (Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 2020). C. P. Cavafy is a constant reference point in her work. In her latest monograph, “Specters of Cavafy” (Michigan UP, forthcoming 2024), she proposes the specter as a conceptual metaphor for revisiting Cavafy’s poetics and his poetry’s afterlives.