Greek Studies Now - Updates

[Claudio Russello]

Dear MGSA list,

On behalf of the collective Greek Studies Now, I would like to draw your attention to our latest activities and publications, and to invite you to contribute to our website.

To mark the five-year anniversary of our academic network, we organised a two-day event in Oxford. During this gathering, we celebrated the publication of Maria Boletsi’s award-winning book Specters of Cavafy with a series of responses from members of our collective, and we hosted a colloquium where members of our network presented new projects and works-in-progress. In June 2025, we also launched the first Anafi Summer School, a set of cultural analysis seminars led by members of the collective and open to the public in the small island of the Aegean. This year’s theme was Approaching the Archive.

Our blog continues to grow, now featuring new book self-reviews—what we call Book-selves—alongside fresh posts. Recent contributors include:

• Will Stroebel, on the multilayered linguistic landscape of the Eastern Mediterranean in his book Literature's Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape (Princeton UP, 2025); 
• Maria Boletsi, on the affordances of a hauntological reading of Cavafy in her Specters of Cavafy (University of Michigan Press, 2024);
• Bahriye Kemal, on her multimodal approach to the complexities of Cypriot culture in Writing Cyprus: Postcolonial and Partitioned Literatures of Place and Space (Routledge, 2020).

We’ve also published new blog posts on a range of themes:

• Dimitris Papanikolaou presents the work of Mario Banushi, whose latest play became the talk of this year’s Avignon Festival;
• Olivia Scarr offers a creative response to Soloúp’s comic book Aivali;
• Claudio Russello writes a critical piece on the need to decolonise the Greko community of southern Italy;
• Billie Mitsikakos provides a radical reading of spectrophilia in Cavafy’s “Kimon Learchou” – instead of a poem on jealousy and the micropolitics of social mobility, Mitsikakos reads a statement on queer desire, complex erotic attachments and the openness of a community to come.

Finally, we are now launching an open call for submissions to both our blog and Book-Self sections. If your work engages with cultural analysis in the fields of Modern Greek and Comparative Studies, we encourage you to submit! Contributions should be 1,000-2,000 words and will be reviewed by the GSN editorial team.

Whether you're a long-time member of our network or newly discovering our work, we warmly invite you to explore the latest contributions, share your own reflections, and help us shape the next chapter of Greek Studies Now.

Warm wishes, 

Dr Claudio Russello, on behalf of the Greek Studies Now Collective

Dr Claudio Russello

Mary Seeger O'Boyle Postdoctoral Fellow

Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

Princeton University

📧 cr5...@princeton.edu