Academic Staff

University of Patras

Ioannis Papatheodorou (Director)

Ioannis Papatheodorou is a Professor of Modern Greek Philology at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Patras. He has previously held teaching positions at the University of Thessaly and the University of Ioannina; since 2018, he has served in his current professorship at Patras. He has twenty years of experience in distance learning through the Hellenic Open University (HOU). His primary scholarly output, published in Greek and international outlets, focuses on the work of Stratis Tsirkas and C.P. Cavafy, 19th and 20th-century Greek authors and broader inquiries into Literary Theory and History.

Selected monographs and books:

  • Romantic Destinies: Aristotelis Valaoritis as a “National Poet” (Bibliorama, 2009).
  • Unwritten Histories: On the “Drifting Cities” (Agra, 2024).
  • Innocent Marbles: A Dispute over the Bust of Theofilos Kairis (May 1912) (Amolgos, 2025).
  • Deceptive Past: Histories of Cavafian Criticism (1933-1963) (Agra, 2025).
  • Black Guillotine: Literary Narratives of Capital Executions in the 19th Century (Opportuna, 2026) [Forthcoming, ISBN 978-960-553-107-2].

Katerina Kostiou

Katerina Kostiou has been a Professor of Modern Greek Philology at the University of Patras since 1997. Her research interests center on 19th and 20th-century poetry and prose, literary theory— especially on irony, satire and parody—archival research and editorial practice. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and collective volumes on the works of Cavafy, Seferis, Montis, Skarimbas and others. Her theoretical work explores disability studies and translation. A notable aspect of her career is her archival stewardship; she has cataloged the archives of G. Th. Vafopoulos, Giannis Skarimbas (ELIA), and George Seferis (Gennadius Library). In 2016, she founded the “Laboratory of Modern Greek Philology: Archival Evidence and Press.” Her recent monograph, …As a Mere Name: The Construction and Function of the Persona in C.P. Cavafy’s Poetry (Nefeli, 2022) received the 2023 Essay Award from the journal O Anagnostis.

Eleni Papargyriou

Eleni Papargyriou is an Assistant Professor in Modern Greek Literary Studies         at the University of Patras. She has held teaching and research positions at the   Hellenic Open University, the University of Amsterdam, the University of         Vienna, King’s College London, Princeton University and Oxford University.      She has published the monograph Reading Games in the Greek Novel (Legenda 2011) and co-edited the volumes Camera Graeca: Photographs,       Narratives, Materialities (2015) και Greece in British Women’s Literary         Imagination 1913-2013 (2017), and the special issues Cavafy Pop: Readings of C.P. Cavafy in Popular Culture (2015) και ‘1821’: Mediation,       Reception, Archive (2021). Her research interests focus on European and             Greek modernism, intercultural literary relations, photography and      literature and, more recently, digital literary studies. She is Principal Co-           Editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of Greek Media and Culture.

Sapienza University of Rome

Christos Bintoudis

Christos Bintoudis is an Associate Professor of Modern Greek Language and Literature at Sapienza University of Rome. His research spans across the history of ideas, translation studies and Greco-Italian cultural relations. He approaches translation through a socio-theoretical lens, highlighting it as a social phenomenon shaped by institutions, publishing mechanisms and power dynamics.

He was instrumental in founding the Mario Vitti Modern Greek Observatory at     Sapienza—an interdisciplinary digital platform for the study of Modern Greek literature translated into Italian. In 2019, he co-founded the “Mirsini Zorba” Laboratory of Modern Greek Studies, further strengthening the nexus between Greek studies and the broader cultural sphere.

Francesca Zaccone

Francesca Zaccone (PhD 2019) served as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Modern Greek Language and Literature at Sapienza University (2020–2025), where she co-founded the “Mirsini Zorba” Laboratory. Since 2022 she has been lecturing on the Translation of Greek-Cypriot Literature and collaborating with Gender Studies programmes. In 2025 she joined the University for Foreigners of Siena to teach Modern Greek Language and Culture.

As a literary translator, she has rendered the works of Kiki Dimoula, Thanasis Valtinos, and Kostas Tachtsis into Italian. Her methodological approach is deeply rooted in Cultural Studies, focusing on late 20th-century Greek and Cypriot literary production.