Gonda Van Steen earned a MA degree in Classics in her native Belgium and a PhD degree in Classics and Hellenic Studies from Princeton University. As the Cassas Chair in Greek Studies at the University of Florida, she teaches courses in ancient and modern Greek language and literature. Her research interests include classical drama, French travelers to Greece and the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth and twentieth-century receptions of the classics, and modern Greek intellectual history. Van Steen’s first book, Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece, was published by Princeton University Press in 2000 and was awarded the John D. Criticos Prize from the London Hellenic Society. In her book of 2010, Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire, revolutionary uses of Aeschylus’ Persians (1820s) and the Venus de Milo take center stage. Van Steen recently published another book titled Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands (OUP, 2011), which discusses the ancient tragedies that were produced by the political prisoners of the Greek Civil War (late 1940s through 1950s). She is currently working on a book manuscript that analyzes theater life, performance, and censorship under the Greek military dictatorship of 1967-1974. She has also published articles on ancient Greek and late antique literature and on postwar Greek feminism.
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