C. P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature, Department of Classical Studies and Department of Comparative Literature, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
aleontis@umich.eduOffice Information:
2152 Angell Hall
435 South State St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
phone: 734.764.0126
Education/Degree:
Ph.D. Comparative Studies, Ohio State University, Division of Comparative Studies and Graduate School, 1991M.A. Ancient Greek, Ohio State University, Department of Classics, 1984
B.A. Religious Studies and Studio Art, Oberlin College, 1979
About
I received liberal arts training with majors in Religious Studies and Studio Art at Oberlin College and postgraduate training in Classical Languages and Literature and Modern Greek at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Ohio State University. I have taught courses in Classical Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan since 1999. I have received fellowships from the Greek Department of External Affairs, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the UM Humanities Institute.
My field of specialization is Modern Greek Studies: the study of Greeks, the Greek language, migrations in and out of Greece by various ethnic groups, and the idea of Greece cultivated in the West in the modern period. Greece gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s by arguing historical descent from Greek antiquity. Henceforth the desire to align a corporeal, living Greekness with the idea of Greece cultivated in the West became a driving force in the country’s cultural production.
My first book, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland, compared Westerner’s projections of their collective fantasies on Greece and Greek literary modernism’s reterritorialization of those projections. It traced how Greeks inscribed the texts, materials, and geographical notions of Hellenism onto their national space: the forms of adaptation, resistance, and opposition to Western interventions they developed and deployed. Since the publication of that book, my inquiry into competing figurations of Greekness has expanded in several new directions.
Central to my present work is the attention I give to writing for different audiences. The paradoxes and strains in perceptions of Greece, manifested today in the European debt and refugee crisis, keep me attuned to the importance of the Humanities in public life. I am acutely aware of my own responsibility as a scholar to cultivate strategies that reach diverse publics. Accordingly, I have developed projects in forms besides print (museum exhibits, digital video recordings, and websites) to reach audiences beyond the specialists in my field, including colleagues, students, journalists, and a broad, educated readership. My research has also participated in broadening the disciplinary range of Modern Greek Studies and accessing and preserving suppressed archives.
My multi-media interests are especially apparent in my investigation of the life and work of Eva Palmer Sikelianos (1874-1952). The Bryn Mawr-educated American visionary lived in Greece from 1907 to 1933 and was married to poet Angelos Sikelianos. She worked for a lifetime to animate the lost Greek life suggested by ancient ruins and living practices. My writing of this book took me on a 10-year journey to recover the traces of her life, from the “Eva Sikelianou Papers” in the Benaki Museum Historical Archives to letters and artifacts collected (and sometimes hidden) in unexpected places such as the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens.
The resulting book, Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, published also in Greek, follows the difficult journey of the wealthy lesbian expatriate Eva Palmer who worked as actor, director, composer, weaver, translator, and activist to make the world more beautiful and free, and whose most extraordinary achievement was her daily, unscripted performance of an art of living after the Greeks. A probing biography, the book draws on overlooked archival sources to connect its subject to more famous artists in the U.S., France, and Greece and to ask: in what ways have dead Greeks been haunting modern life, what challenges are posed to the West by Modern Greece, and can a person sustain a transformative art of living on a daily basis while absorbing the shocks and heartbreaks of perpetual noncomformity?
An article entitled "The Lost Letters" in LSA Magazine previews current work cataloguing, digitizing, and publishing a large cache of love letters of Eva Palmer Sikelianos with Natalie Barney and many other women. It hidden for decades in a closet in the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens. My recent lecture, "Women Talking in a Closet of the Archive of Hellenismas," is the core of a new book project that follows the twists and turns in the creation and suppression of that collection and my work as its "accidental archivist."
Other book projects include Greece: A Travelers’ Literary Companion (1997) published by Whereabouts Press in a series that introduces English language readers to countries through those countries’ own writers; and Culture and Customs of Greece, written for a trade press to introduce students and general readers to countries of the world through a presentation of present-day cultural phenomena.
I am the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies (2014-2019, 2024-2026).
Books and Special Issues
AUTHORED BOOKS
Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2019).
Εύα Πάλμερ-Σικελιανού: Υφαίνοντας τον μύθο μιας ζωής (Pataki Publishers 2022)
Culture and Customs of Greece (Westport CT: Greenwood Press/ABC-CLIO, 2009) in the series “Culture and Customs of Europe.”
Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping a Homeland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) in the series “Myth and Poetics” edited by Gregory Nagy.
Τοπογραφίες Ελληνισμού: Η χαρτογράφηση της πατρίδας (Greek translation of Topographies of Hellenism, translated by. P. Stogiannos. Athens: Scripta, 1998).
EDITED VOLUMES
Eva Palmer – Natalie Clifford Barney Letters, coedited book and digital archive with Suzanne Stroh and Giulia Napoleone (in progress).
“What These Ithakas Mean…”: Readings in Cavafy, coedited with Keith Taylor and Laurie E. Talalay of an illustrated book, published by ELIA, the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive (February 2002). (Cited in the TLS as one of the best books of 2002).
Greece: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (San Francisco: Whereabouts Press, 1997).
EDITED JOURNAL ISSUES
Journal of Modern Greek Studies Special section: “Selections from the Prizewinning Translations of the 2013 MGSA Elizabeth Constantinides Memorial Prize Competition,” co-edited with Karen Emmerich, with co-authored Preface, “Greek Literature Gains in Translation.” JMGS vol. 31:2 (October 2013): 277-316.
Thesis 11, “Mediterranean: Theories and Histories,” co-edited with Peter Murphy, vol. 67 (Nov. 1999).
EXHIBIT CATALOG
Cavafy’s World (website)
Women’s Fabric Arts in Greek America, 1894-1994 (Columbus, 1994).
Research Areas:
Modern Greek Studies; classical reception studies; travel writing; critical heritage studies; gender and sexuality; language pedagogy; national and transnational Hellenism
About
I received liberal arts training with majors in Religious Studies and Studio Art at Oberlin College and postgraduate training in Classical Languages and Literature and Modern Greek at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Ohio State University. I have taught courses in Classical Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan since 1999. I have received fellowships from the Greek Department of External Affairs, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the UM Humanities Institute.
My field of specialization is Modern Greek Studies: the study of Greeks, the Greek language, migrations in and out of Greece by various ethnic groups, and the idea of Greece cultivated in the West in the modern period. Greece gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s by arguing historical descent from Greek antiquity. Henceforth the desire to align a corporeal, living Greekness with the idea of Greece cultivated in the West became a driving force in the country’s cultural production.
My first book, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland, compared Westerner’s projections of their collective fantasies on Greece and Greek literary modernism’s reterritorialization of those projections. It traced how Greeks inscribed the texts, materials, and geographical notions of Hellenism onto their national space: the forms of adaptation, resistance, and opposition to Western interventions they developed and deployed. Since the publication of that book, my inquiry into competing figurations of Greekness has expanded in several new directions.
Central to my present work is the attention I give to writing for different audiences. The paradoxes and strains in perceptions of Greece, manifested today in the European debt and refugee crisis, keep me attuned to the importance of the Humanities in public life. I am acutely aware of my own responsibility as a scholar to cultivate strategies that reach diverse publics. Accordingly, I have developed projects in forms besides print (museum exhibits, digital video recordings, and websites) to reach audiences beyond the specialists in my field, including colleagues, students, journalists, and a broad, educated readership. My research has also participated in broadening the disciplinary range of Modern Greek Studies and accessing and preserving suppressed archives.
My multi-media interests are especially apparent in my investigation of the life and work of Eva Palmer Sikelianos (1874-1952). The Bryn Mawr-educated American visionary lived in Greece from 1907 to 1933 and was married to poet Angelos Sikelianos. She worked for a lifetime to animate the lost Greek life suggested by ancient ruins and living practices. My writing of this book took me on a 10-year journey to recover the traces of her life, from the “Eva Sikelianou Papers” in the Benaki Museum Historical Archives to letters and artifacts collected (and sometimes hidden) in unexpected places such as the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens.
The resulting book, Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, published also in Greek, follows the difficult journey of the wealthy lesbian expatriate Eva Palmer who worked as actor, director, composer, weaver, translator, and activist to make the world more beautiful and free, and whose most extraordinary achievement was her daily, unscripted performance of an art of living after the Greeks. A probing biography, the book draws on overlooked archival sources to connect its subject to more famous artists in the U.S., France, and Greece and to ask: in what ways have dead Greeks been haunting modern life, what challenges are posed to the West by Modern Greece, and can a person sustain a transformative art of living on a daily basis while absorbing the shocks and heartbreaks of perpetual noncomformity?
An article entitled "The Lost Letters" in LSA Magazine previews current work cataloguing, digitizing, and publishing a large cache of love letters of Eva Palmer Sikelianos with Natalie Barney and many other women. It hidden for decades in a closet in the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens. My recent lecture, "Women Talking in a Closet of the Archive of Hellenismas," is the core of a new book project that follows the twists and turns in the creation and suppression of that collection and my work as its "accidental archivist."
Other book projects include Greece: A Travelers’ Literary Companion (1997) published by Whereabouts Press in a series that introduces English language readers to countries through those countries’ own writers; and Culture and Customs of Greece, written for a trade press to introduce students and general readers to countries of the world through a presentation of present-day cultural phenomena.
I am the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies (2014-2019, 2024-2026).
Books and Special Issues
AUTHORED BOOKS
Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2019).
Εύα Πάλμερ-Σικελιανού: Υφαίνοντας τον μύθο μιας ζωής (Pataki Publishers 2022)
Culture and Customs of Greece (Westport CT: Greenwood Press/ABC-CLIO, 2009) in the series “Culture and Customs of Europe.”
Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping a Homeland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) in the series “Myth and Poetics” edited by Gregory Nagy.
Τοπογραφίες Ελληνισμού: Η χαρτογράφηση της πατρίδας (Greek translation of Topographies of Hellenism, translated by. P. Stogiannos. Athens: Scripta, 1998).
EDITED VOLUMES
Eva Palmer – Natalie Clifford Barney Letters, coedited book and digital archive with Suzanne Stroh and Giulia Napoleone (in progress).
“What These Ithakas Mean…”: Readings in Cavafy, coedited with Keith Taylor and Laurie E. Talalay of an illustrated book, published by ELIA, the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive (February 2002). (Cited in the TLS as one of the best books of 2002).
Greece: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (San Francisco: Whereabouts Press, 1997).
EDITED JOURNAL ISSUES
Journal of Modern Greek Studies Special section: “Selections from the Prizewinning Translations of the 2013 MGSA Elizabeth Constantinides Memorial Prize Competition,” co-edited with Karen Emmerich, with co-authored Preface, “Greek Literature Gains in Translation.” JMGS vol. 31:2 (October 2013): 277-316.
Thesis 11, “Mediterranean: Theories and Histories,” co-edited with Peter Murphy, vol. 67 (Nov. 1999).
EXHIBIT CATALOG
Cavafy’s World (website)
Women’s Fabric Arts in Greek America, 1894-1994 (Columbus, 1994).
Research Areas:
Modern Greek Studies; classical reception studies; travel writing; critical heritage studies; gender and sexuality; language pedagogy; national and transnational Hellenism
