Stathis Gourgouris

Stathis Gourgouris is a poet, essayist, translator, sound artist, and professor of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is the author of “Dream Nation” (1996; 25th Anniversary edition, 2021); “Does Literature Think?” (2003); “Lessons in Secular Criticism” (2013); “The Perils of the One” (2019), and editor of “Freud and Fundamentalism” (2010) and “Thinking with Balibar” (2020). His newest book, “Nothing Sacred,” is forthcoming from Columbia UP (2024). He has also published numerous articles on Ancient Greek philosophy, political theory, modern poetics, film, contemporary music, and psychoanalysis. He writes regularly in Internet media (such as “The Huffington Post,” “Los Angeles Review of Books,” Al Jazeera, openDemocracy), as well as major Greek newspapers and journals on political and literary matters. A collection of such essays on poetics and politics, written in Greek over a period of 25 years (including a number of unpublished pieces), was published in 2016 with the title “Ενδεχομένως αταξίες” [Contingent Disorders]. He is an internationally awarded poet, with four volumes of poetry published in Greek and translated into English, German, French, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese. His poetry, music, and visual art collaborations have been performed in various festivals including UKS Archives in Oslo, ICA in London, documenta 14 in Athens, Thessaloniki Concert Hall, Montreal Pop Festival, SynTalk in Mumbai, STUDIOvisits Gallery in Berlin, Ambersand International Art Gallery in San Francisco, and 4th International Poetry Festival in Sapanca, Turkey. He is a member of the Hellenic Authors Society, an Honorary Member of PEN Greece, and co-founder of the Sublamental Artists Collective. He has served as Director of the Program in Hellenic Studies (2020-23) and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia (2009-2015); President of the Modern Greek Studies Association (2006-2012); and at the Board of Supervisors of the English Institute, Harvard University (2006-2009). In 2015 he was honored with the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award and in 2023 with a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

An extensive interview covering the whole range of his work can be found in the “Los Angeles Review of Books”: Part I “Dream Nation and the Phantasm of Europe”; Part II “Poetics and the Political World”.