Professor Maria Boletsi

Marilena Laskaridis Chair of Modern Greek Studies, University of Amsterdam, Assistant Professor of Film and Comparative Literature, University of Leiden

Maria Boletsi is Endowed Professor at the University of Amsterdam, where she holds the Marilena Laskaridis Chair of Modern Greek Studies, and Assistant Professor at the Film and Comparative Literature department of Leiden University (the Netherlands).

Her work is situated in the fields of comparative literature, literary and cultural theory, conceptual history, Modern Greek literature and culture, and English, Dutch, and postcolonial literatures. She has published on various topics, including the conceptual history of barbarism, post-9/11 literature and political rhetoric, Modern Greek literature, and alternative narratives and subjectivities in the context of the Greek debt crisis.

She is the author of Barbarism and Its Discontents (Stanford University Press, 2013) and co-author of the books and Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Modern Theory, Literature and the Arts. Vol. 1 (J.B. Metzler, 2018) and De lichtheid van literatuur: Engagement in de multiculturele samenleving (The Lightness of Literature: Engagement in the Multicultural Society; Acco 2015). She has co-edited the volumes Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes: From Crisis to Critique (Palgrave Macmillan; in press, forthcoming spring 2020), Subjects Barbarian, Monstrous, and Wild: Encounters in the Arts and Contemporary Politics (Brill 2018), Barbarism Revisited: New Perspectives on an Old Concept (Brill 2015), and Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Ways of Knowing in the Humanities (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009). She is currently writing Specters of Cavafy, a book on the poetics of the spectral in the work of the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy.