These are the Special Subject options available in 2026-27. These are indicative of the course offerings for the sub-faculty, so applicants should note that not all options will run in all years, and some course content might change. 

Cavafy in the World (Michaelmas Term)
Convenor: Prof. Dimitris Papanikolaou and Dr. Trisevgeni Bilia

The aim of this seminar will be to revisit the work of Cavafy, while also taking into account this work’s global presence and the way we can see this global presence as an opening to discuss current issues in Comparative and World Literature studies. This is a seminar about Cavafy, Cavafy in comparative contexts, and global Cavafy as a way to review debates on comparison, cultural capital, sexuality and biopolitics, archaeopolitics, worlding and translation. It is also a seminar that aims to discuss very recent fascinating insights on Cavafy (such as the recent special issue by Boundary 2 on Cavafy and postcoloniality; essays on queer Cavafy and Cavafy and cultural capital by Kosofsky Sedgwick, Faubion, Halim, Mendelsohn; the work of M. Boletsi on Cavafian hauntology; or the work by Gourgouris and Emerich on translation and adaptation) alongside older arguments, readings and bibliography; and, of course, alongside Cavafy’s poems and our own evolving relationship with them.

Translation and Adaptation: Texts, Histories, Practices (Michaelmas Term or Hilary Term) 
Convenor: Kostas Skordyles

The transference of literary works into another language is increasingly seen as a creative process, blurring the boundaries between translation and adaptation. Translation is often thought of not as a fixed concept but as forming a ‘changing’ textuality, whose boundaries are historically set by discursive practices and translational norms. In this seminar, students will be guided through key concepts in translation studies and various types of considerations that need to be taken into account in the production and analysis of literary translations. The theoretical work of L. Venuti, E. Gentzler, H. Vermeer, G. Toury, I. Even-Zohar and others will provide the framework for a close reading of a number of texts and their translations/adaptations into/from Greek. We will start from obvious examples (from the multiple translations of Cavafy into English, Kazantzakis’s various editions and translations and the famous translations of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into Greek by Seferis, Papatzonis and others, to Jenny Mastoraki’s Greek translations of The Catcher in the Rye or Vassilis Alexakis self-translations between French and Greek). But the students are expected, based on the theoretical and critical literature discussed, to search for new examples and organize presentations and essays on specific case studies.

The Literature of the Fringe in the History of Greek Writing from the Fourth to the Sixteenth Century (Michaelmas Term or Hilary Term)
Convenor: Stratis Papaioannou

While the history of Greek literature is often centred on canonical, classicizing learned texts, a massive undercurrent of writing operated at the margins of official cultural and religious orthodoxy. This seminar explores the "literature of the fringe"—texts composed in low and middle linguistic registers that often eschewed elite education or actively opposed formal erudition. Over this twelve-century span, these non-canonical works served as primary sites of narrative imagination but also conservative resistance, amplifying gaps in ideology as well as literary creativity that official discourses were unable to pursue. By tracking the manuscript circulation, translations, and cross-media impact of these texts, students will analyse how "popular" writing shaped the broader Greek literary ecosystem.

Weekly meetings will combine literary sociology with close readings of primary sources across a wide chronological arc. We will trace this alternative tradition from early Christian apocrypha and imaginative "Visions and Revelations" (such as the Apocalypse of Paul) to the vernacular adventures of the Alexander Romance and Digenis Akrites. We will also examine the first-person "Tales" (Diegeseis) of desert dwellers, early modern satirical poetry, and the popular undercurrents of late Byzantine and early Ottoman manuscripts. Utilizing the methodologies discussed, students will identify understudied examples to develop their own presentations and research essays.

Greek Textual Transmission and Book Culture: From Late Antiquity to the Early Modern World (Michaelmas Term or Hilary Term)
Convenor: Prof. Stratis Papaioannou

This seminar offers an advanced introduction to Greek textual culture (4th–16th c. CE), focusing on the diverse modes of textual transmission across manuscripts, inscriptions, translations, and printed editions, alongside the sociology of the premodern and early modern book. Students will explore the shifting socio-cultural contexts and agents of text production, the history of libraries and translations, and the material preservation of classical, patristic, Byzantine, and early modern literature. A central ambition of the course is to map the process of textualization—tracing how literature, which often originated in oral performance, ritual, or public recitation, was captured, fixed, and adapted into written form across different media.

Students will learn how to analyse the transmission history of a work by investigating the social networks, educational centres, and commercial workshops that sustained Greek literature across centuries. Rather than treating texts as abstract concepts, we will approach them as material objects tied to specific historical actors—from the scribes of Late Antiquity and Byzantium to the Renaissance humanists and early printers. We will trace how texts changed meaning as they migrated between oral, epigraphic, handwritten, and typographic formats, examining landmark early editions alongside contemporary manuscripts and monumental inscriptions to understand how these media cross-pollinated. Based on the historical and methodological frameworks discussed, students are expected to search for new examples of textual transmission and organize presentations and essays on specific case studies. 

 

Modern Greek Literature in Comparative Frames (Hilary Term) 
Convenor: Dr. Trisevgeni Bilia

This Special Subject aims to encourage the study of 19th, 20th and 21st century Greek literature and culture in a comparative and world literature frame. We will start from the discussion of obvious and well-known case studies, such as: Greek Romanticism and its European counterparts; naturalism and the Greek iθoypap(a; Surrealism in Greece; Greek and other modernisms; European aestheticism and Cavafy; literature/culture duringthe Greek dictatorship and the global ‘60s; ‘Sung Poetry’ in Europe and the case of the Greek Melopoiemene Poiese; postmodernism in Greece and beyond; the reception of Greek literature outside Greece in different historical moments; Greece of the Crisis as a global moment; Greece and the Global South). Students will be asked to contribute their own examples and develop their own comparative perspectives, starting from specific genres, themes, or authors/artists, and moving on to explore movements, parallels, intertextual affinities, creative engagements and the dynamics of reading different texts and contexts together.