Byron’s Voices: Cultural and Textual Interactions

11 November 2017

Museum of Byzantine Culture of Thessaloniki
Amphitheatre "Stefanos Dragoumis"

Speakers

Timothy Webb is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol where he was Winterstoke Professor and for nine years Head of the Department of English. He has written and lectured widely, mostly on Romantic topics (especially on Shelley and Byron), on translation, and on Irish topics (especially Yeats and Joyce). His two-volume annotated edition of Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography is scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press next year. Work in progress includes: a detailed study of English Romantic writers and Ireland; The book of Stones, an imaginative reader; an edition of the second volume of Shelley’s prose (with Michael O’Neill); Four English Emmets; and five or six volumes of collected essays.

Jane Stabler is Professor of Romantic Literature and Head of the School of English at the University of St Andrews. She has written Byron, Poetics and History (CUP 2002) and The Artistry of Exile: Romantic & Victorian Writers in Italy (OUP 2013). She is currently working with Dr Gavin Hopps on the Longman Annotated English Poets Edition of Byron’s poetry and held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2014-17) to complete work on the annotation of the Don Juan volume.

Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou is Emeritus Professor of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She taught English and Comparative Literature at the English Department of AUTH. She has written extensively on topics related to Romantic poetry and poetics, Greek and comparative literature, philosophy, women poets, feminist criticism, and cultural studies. Her publications include the following books and papers: Plato and the English Romantics: διάλογοι (Routledge, 1990, 2013); “The Gender of Transcendence in Shelley’s Poetry”, in Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1992, ed. James Hogg (Edwin Mellen Press, 1993); “The 'Name of Freedom': A Hermeneutic Reading of Hellas”, in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Stuart Curran and Betty Bennett (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); “Blood Sisters: Mary Shelley, Liz Lochhead, and the Monster”, in Mary Shelley in Her Times, ed. Betty Bennett and Stuart Curran (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Fantasies of the Feminine: From Sappho to Derrida (Paratiritis, 2003); Body of Delight and Distress: Forms of Incarnation in Greek Poetry (Ianos, 2005); Female Fiction: Women Poets of the 20^th Century (Papazissis, 2007); Andro-gynous Readings: Percy Shelley & Mary Shelley (Epikentro, 2010); The Greece of Romanticism: Approaches of the English Poets Byron, Shelley, Keats (AUTH Publications, 2012); “Byron’s ‘historicity’ and the History of Ideas”, in The Place of Lord Byron in World History: Studies in His Life, Writings, and Influence, ed. Nic Panagopoulos and Maria Schoina (Edwin Mellen Press, 2012).

Argyros Protopapas is a Romanticist and Shelley specialist. He studied English at the Universities of Athens and Southampton (UK). His long and active participation in the Philosophical Seminar at the University of Athens back in the 1980s, is reflected on his work focusing on Romanticism and its relationship to Classical Philosophical thought and early modern scientific culture. He has held, as English teacher and educator, teaching and administrative EU posts, while lecturing, at the same time, in British and Greek Universities. He conducted extended research on the poetry of P. B. Shelley (1987-96) sponsored by the British Academy and the Univ. of Southampton under the supervision of Professors Isobel Armstrong, James Sambrook and Paul Hamilton. He has published broadly on the work of Shelley and Byron, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot and, as a published poet, introduced, after his return to Greece from the UK, the experimental Poetry Workshop in the Univ. of Athens in 2007-8, appended to the Literary Translation main course. His 2012 monograph, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetic Science: His Visionary Enterprise and the Crisis of Self-Consciousness, tracing the epistemological premises of P. B. Shelley’s visionary enterprise and the pursuit of the operations of the human mind, has earned the critical acclaim of accredited academic journals, like The Byron Journal and The Keats-Shelley Review. This emphasis on early cognitive science, which accords with Protopapas’s earlier candidature in Medicine, informs a forthcoming study linking the poet’s Visionary Enterprise to his understanding of Mechanism as well as a volume of related academic articles. Dr. Protopapas, a graduate of the Law School of the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki as well, specialized in Economics and Public International Law, is also the poet of the international Hymn to Peace and Olympic Truce, and has been involved in Peace and Olympic Truce projects in education in cooperation with the International Olympic Truce Centre in Athens.

Maria Schoina is Assistant Professor in English Literature in the School of English of Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. She is the author of Romantic “Anglo-Italians”: Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the Pisan Circle (Ashgate, 2009) and co-editor of The Place of Lord Byron in World History: Studies in His Life, Writings, and Influence (Edwin Mellen Press, 2012, with Nic Panagopoulos). Forthcoming publications include a chapter on the Pisan Circle for Byron in Context (ed. Clara Tuite, Cambridge University Press, 2018) and one on Byron’s Reviewers for The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron (ed. Alan Rawes and Jonathon Shears, 2019). She is currently working on a book project on Mary Shelley and Greece.