International Cavafy Summer School 2025: Cavafy and Egypt

In recent years, there has been a shift in criticism of C. P. Cavafy from an ascription to Alexandrea ad Ægyptum to an engagement with the role of Egypt in his corpus and biography. Resonances of the country where he was born, lived most of his life, and died echo in both his poetry and prose, opening a window onto an extraordinary interplay of Greek and Egyptian cultures centered on Alexandria in both the Hellenistic and modern periods, and reverberating in other epochs and spaces. Cavafy’s life and texts thus serve as a springboard for scrutinizing the complexities of Greek-Egyptian cultural convergence and divergence.

The 2025 ICSS aims to advance comparative and interdisciplinary scholarship on Cavafy’s poetics and politics as an Egyptiote, as well as broader Egyptian-Greek themes beyond his corpus. Focal to the discussions are explorations of Cavafy in relation to contemporary Arab poets, his legacy in Arabic poetry and prose, Arabic translations of his texts, and comparative studies of Egyptian influences in Greek, Egyptiote, and Western writers among his contemporaries.

This summer school is also intended to provide a forum for theoretical, textual, and archival approaches that elucidate such themes as Neohellenism and Neo-Pharaonism, the study of the Classics in the Arab world, Greek-Egyptian affinities of Ottoman legacies, “imagined communities” of cosmopolitanism in Alexandria and other Mediterranean urban spaces, colonialism and varieties of Greek orientalism, and Greek-Arab cultural translation and intermedial adaptation.