Dr Efi Spentzou

• Biographical
• Academic qualifications
• Teaching
• Research
• Publications
• Current projects
• Research Grants
• Ph. D supervision
• External consultancy
• Schools talks
• Contact details

Welcome to my web pages. I hope you will find perusing them useful in some way!

Do please get in touch if your reading sparked a thought (or just a question) and you 'd like to follow it up.

Biographical details

Born and bred in Athens , I moved to Thessaloniki for my BA, where I spend four wonderful years, in what I remember as a friendly and welcoming city by the sea. Some captivating lectures on Ovid's Amores and the Metamorphoses revealed to me the wit and coquetry of Latin poetry as I never imagined it in my school years. Suddenly Latin was perky and Classical poetry started to feel like fun, and very different to the image of it I had developed in my mind at school, an image interesting and worthwhile but a little too staid, too serious and sure of itself. By the end of my studies I wanted more. Not without some trepidation, I arrived at Oxford for an MA, comforted by the fact that it would only last for a year and then I could return, only that in about two months I knew I would do my best to stay on for a doctorate if I could...

Today, in the cheery and green environment of Royal Holloway in the outskirts of London, I am happily juggling two worlds and two cultures, Greek and English (or should I say three? - Greek, English and Classical). I have absorbed experiences and acquired friends from all the places I have lived and studied and all these have merged to make my relationship with classical literature as it is today. I am happy with this multiplicity, as I am happy (most times!) with the multiplicity of pulls in my work interests (more on which, if you wish, at the research section of this page).

I have realised retrospectively that my interests and my research endeavours (however big or small) have often been, even if subconsciously, triggered by wider concerns and stimuli at a given point in my life. I may have liked a particular set of poems because of a wonderful teacher - or simply because I read a book in a mellow autumn's afternoon that made all things seem more meaningful. This is the great thing about literature, classical or other: it is often cryptic or elusive, it may speak metaphorically and with symbolisms but, this way, it speaks for the human condition with eloquence and a special license and delivers opinions and feelings with a sharpness impossible in our everyday thought and haste.

Given the absence of any peculiarities in my entirely normal character (apart of course from translating in my spare time modern Greek poems into English - a sample of which can be found here), I now proceed with more concrete facts about my professional life.

Academic qualifications

• D. Phil. (Oxford) in Classical Languages and Literature. Title: "Reading characters read: transgressions of gender and genre in Ovid's Heroides" 1997
• M.St (Oxford) in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature. 1992
• BA (Thessaloniki) in Classics, Modern Greek Literature and Linguistics.
1991.
• Apolitirio from Lyceum (Athens). 1986

Previous academic career and employment

• RHUL 2006-- Senior Lecturer in Classics, Dept. of Classics, RHUL
• 2000 – 2006 Lecturer in Classics, Dept. of Classics, RHUL
• 1999 – 2000 Visiting lecturer, RHUL
• 1998 – 1999 Lecturer, Dept. of Classics, RHUL
• 1997 – 1998 Part-time Lecturer in Classics, Dept. of Classics, Keele University

Teaching

BA teaching

• Virgil in Translation
• Ovid in Translation
• Understanding Classical Myth
• Latin Love Poets (half unit)
• Imperial Latin Poetry (half unit)
• Culture and Identity from Nero to Hadrian
• Intermediate Latin
• LatinLanguage and Reading
• Special Topics for independent study (year 2)
• Finalist Dissertations (year 3)

MA teaching

• Culture and Identity from Nero to Hadrian
• Flavian Literature and Society
• Classical Past in Modern Greece
• Contributions to core courses:
• Classical presence in Modern Greek literature; continuity and conflict (Reception of Hellenic Tradition, for the MA in Hellenic Studies)
• Classical texts and critical theory (federal MA Research Skills Course).

Research

My first main research endeavour, was a study of intertextuality and the female voice in Ovid's Heroides (now a book with the title Readers and Writers in Ovid's Heroides). The almost complete absence of female authors from the classical canon has been a substantial problem for feminist critiques of the Classics but Ovid's Heroides offers an exceptional insight into the female voice as it slips through Ovid's male authored text. In this book, I develop but also challenge one of the most significant explicative tools of Classical poetryt in recent times, intetextuality, as I attempt to instil ideology into self-reflexive experimentation, and to establish gendered thinking as a drive that pervades a series of political, formalist, generic, reader-oriented and other discourses.

Working on issues of literary voice and the mythical females of the Heroides triggered a specific interest in one of them: Helen of Troy and her paradigmatically silent image as a source of inspiration, and an object of appropriation in ancient as well as modern literature, with whom I deal in published as well as on-going research. My latest work centres around Helen's dramatic monologue in Yiannis Ritsos' poetry and her indictment of her beautified image , an indictment which I read in the context of the complex (and often appropriating and even voyeuristic) relation of the various Modern Greek establishments with their Ancient traditions.

At the same time, Helen as a muse-like figure directed my attention to the complex workings of inspiration and the power struggles behind the neat pages of classical texts. Following a conference on Muse and muse-like figures, I co-edited a volume on the subject entitled Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature. Our book looks beyond the secure and benign images traditionally associated with inspiration in classical literature and scholarship. Inspiration is here not so much explored in its traditional cultic dimensions, but rather invoked for its capacity to trigger fervent debates about power, desire, knowledge, identity, and gender in the societies of Ancient Greece and Rome.

Voice is a precious toll of human conscience, as I have tried to show in the above studies. But silence is also a deeply subversive way to assert, a different sort of victory, gained when one lets go of the obsessive need for control. Even if this is anyway their only choice, the defeated heroines in the Heroides find power in their silenced choice, a course that Ovid himself finds harder to follow. Aspects of voice (or silence), gender, and power and their interrelation are explored further in an article on 'The female voice of silence: Ovid and the heroines in exile' commissioned within the broader context of gender dynamics in Latin love elegy.

On-going interest in the individual in literature, personal voices, public vs private domains, and interdisciplinary discourses and criticism have all met in a major project on the Making of Roman Identities in the late first century AD, a multi-authored and interdisciplinary project funded by Leverhulme Trust. You can find a fuller description of its principles and concerns in the research projects within the research section of this site.

Modern Greek establishments in their relation to ancient traditions are returning to the stage of my research in the form of a sociopolitical study of the aesthetics of modern Greek re-workings of ancient tragedy that will span the 20th and 21st centuries.

Publications

Books

• (co-authored with R. Alston, Reflections of Romanity. Discourses on subjectivity in an Imperial Age (with publishers) More Details...
• Readers and Writers in Ovid's Heroides: Transgressions of Gender and Genre (Oxford 2003)
• Spentzou and Fowler (eds) Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature (Oxford 2002)

Articles, Chapters and Reviews

• ‘The Female Sound of Silence: Ovid and the Heroines in Exile’, in R. Ancona and E. Greene (eds.), Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Elegy (Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), 318-340
• ‘Classical Past and Female Self-definition in Modern Greek Poetry’, in V. Zajko and M. Leonard (eds.), Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought  (Oxford, 2005)
• ‘The Best of the Romans: Redefining the Epic Hero in the Aeneid’, Journal of Classics Teaching vol. 3 (Autumn, 2004)
•  ‘Secularising the Muse’, in E. Spentzou and D. Fowler (eds.), Cultivating the Muse. Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature (Oxford, 2002), pp. 1-28
• ‘Stealing Apollo’s Lyre: Muses and poetic άθλα in Apollonius’ Argonautica 3’, in E. Spentzou and D. Fowler (eds.), Cultivating the Muse. Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature (Oxford, 2002), pp.  93-116
• ‘Athens’, ‘Trojan War and its Diachronic Presence’ and a number of smaller entries for the J. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition (London, 1999)
• ‘Helen of Troy and the Poetics of Innocence: from Ancient Fiction to Modern Metafiction’, Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 16/4 (1996)
• ‘Theorising Ovid’ in P. Knox (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to Ovid’ (Blackwell, 2009), 381-93
• ‘Eluding Romanitas: Heroes and Anti-heroes in Silius Italicus’ Roman History,’ in S. Bell and I. L. Hansen (eds.), Role Models: Identity and Assimilation in the Roman World (Michigan UP, 2008), 133-46

In Press

• ‘Violence and Alienation in Lucan’s Civil War’, in M. Gale and D. Scourfield (eds.), Texts and Violence in Latin Literature (Cambridge, 2008)

Reviews
·

• M. Janan, When the Lamp is Shattered: Desire and Narrative in Catullus, in Journal of Roman Studies 85 (1995)
• F. Dupont, The Invention of Literature. From Greek Intoxication to the Latin Book, in Classical Review 53/1 (2003)
• C. Newlands, Statius’ Silvae and the Poetics of Empire, in The Journal of Roman Studies  94 (2004)
• P. Allen Miller, Subjecting Verses, in The Journal of Roman Studies 95 (2005)
• Y. Syed, Virgil’s Aeneid and the Roman Self  in the Journal of Classics Teaching, vol. 5 (2006)

In Preparation

• The Epic Wor(l)d of the Aeneid (Duckworth, 2009)
• Introductory monograph on Latin love elegy (solicited by Duckworth for Classical World series)
• ‘Fragility and Assertion in the Catullan Self’ to be submitted to Materiali et Discussioni dei Testi Classici.

Research Grants

• 2000 Leverhulme Institutional Grant £82.869 for the creation of a monograph on the Making of Imperial Identities: From Nero to Hadrian (with Richard Alston as Principal Applicant).
• 2005 AHRC Research Extension Grant.

Ph.D supervision

Topics I have been involved in and welcome include:

• Ovidian and Augustan literature in general
• Feminist critiques of classical texts
• Comparative Greco-Roman studies
• Reception within Greek and Roman cultures
• Modern Reception of the Classics and especially of Classical myth in modern Greek literature.

External consultancy

2001  Advisory Board for the Digital Resources for the Humanities Conference (London)
2005  Advisor on Tenure appointment for Promotions Committee, Boston University

Reader for:
Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge
Journal of the Hellenic Tradition
Classical Philology
American Journal of Philology
Arethusa

Let me tell you about...

Schools talks

• Passions, art, and Roman sensitivities in Catullus
• The Roman Republican self: fragility and assertion in Catullus
• Love poetry around Augustus
• The new Achilles: redefining the epic hero in the Aeneid.
• Silver Latin heroism: from Lucan to Silius Italicus.
• Deviant and suppressed narrators in Ovid's Metamorphoses
• Subverting the epic genre in Ovid's Metamorphoses
• Rome and politics in the Metamorphoses
• Women and gender in Roman literature
• Classical myth in modern literature
• Studying Classics at the University: paths and prospects

Contact details

E-mail: e.spentzou@rhul.ac.uk