Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek Literature
nkanavou@phil.uoa.gr
Nikoletta Kanavou studied Classics at the Universities of Athens (BA) and Oxford (MSt, DPhil). Before moving to the University of Athens, she held a Humboldt Research Fellowship, and then a scholarship by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the University of Heidelberg. She has taught classical literature and civilisation at the Universities of Oxford, Cyprus, Crete, Heidelberg, and at the Cypriot and Hellenic Open Universities. She has also worked as a research assistant on the Oxford-based project ‘A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names’, which collects and publishes ancient Greek personal names with their sources.
Research Interests:
One major focus of her recent work in the field of Greco-Roman literature is fictitious prose narratives of the imperial period (1st c. BC – 4th c. AD), a literary genre that is comparable to that of the modern ‘novel’ and ‘novella’. She has recently published a monograph on the fictitious biography of the wise man Apollonius of Tyana, the ‘pagan Christ’, by Philostratus (early 3rd c. AD) (see above). She is at present working towards a commentary on Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius (2nd c. AD), a love-adventure story and one of the very few Greco-Roman ‘novels’ that survive complete. She is also very interested in locating, editing and commenting on fragments of ancient Greek fictitious narratives, several of which are preserved on papyri and are not widely known among scholars, although they offer fascinating glimpses of lost works.
Select publications: