Panagiotis Roilos
Panagiotis Roilos studied at the University of Athens (B.A./Ptychion in Classics, Byzantine, and Modern Greek Literature) and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1999). He is the President of the European Cultural Center of Delphi, a major cultural institute in Europe, which functions under the auspices of the Council of Europe and the supervision of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. He is a member of the Governing Board of the Hellenic Harvard Foundation.
Professor Roilos has been offered a Forschungsstipendium für erfahrene Wissenschaftler from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and has been a Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. He is the founder and director of the Delphi Academy of European Studies and of the international cultural forum Delphi Dialogues. He was a member of the “Greece 2021” honorary Committee of the Hellenic Republic, whose activities marked the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution, and serves on the Advisory Board of the research and policy institute Dianeosis. He has been awarded an Honorary PhD from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens.
Professor Roilos’s publications and research interests center upon postclassical Greek literature and culture, cognitive humanities, comparative poetics, reception studies, medieval and modern literary theory, ritual studies, orality and literacy, European aestheticism (with a focus on Greek and British literature). He has conducted extensive fieldwork on traditional oral literature in South Italy as well as in Crete and the Peloponnese.
He is the author of the books C. P. Cavafy: The Economics of Metonymy (2009; Greek edition [Κ. Π. Καβάφης: Η οικονομία του ερωτισμού], translated by A. Katsikros, 2016); Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel (2005); Towards a Ritual Poetics (2003; co-author with D. Yatromanolakis; Greek edition [Προς μία τελετουργική ποιητική], translated by Manos Skouras and with a preface by Marcel Detienne entitled "For an Anthropological Approach," 2005; Italian edition [Verso una poetica rituale], translated by Chiara Rizzelli Martella and with a preface by Marcel Detienne, 2014); and, more recently, of “Lamenting Greece”: On Early German Philhellenism (16th and 17th Centuries) (in Greek; 2026).
His major publications include also the books Greek Ritual Poetics (co-editor; 2005); Imagination and Logos: Essays on C.P. Cavafy (editor; 2010); Medieval Greek Storytelling: Fictionality and Narrative in Byzantium (editor; 2014); Mythogenesis, Interdiscursivity, Ritual: Studies Presented to Demetrios Yatromanolakis (co-editor with Burkhard Fehr; 2024 [see review: https://www.academia.edu/168038700Alberto_Parisi_Review_of_Burkhard_Fehr_and_Panagiotis_Roilos_eds_Mythogenesis_Interdiscursivity_Ritual_Studies_Presented_to_Demetrios_Yatromanolakis_Brill_Leiden_and_Boston_2024_]); From Byzantium to the Early Greek Enlightenment: Books, Writers, and Ideologies in Early Modern Greek Contexts (editor; 2026).
Professor Roilos is currently completing a book on digital posthumanism, the crisis of representation, and democracy entitled Neomedieval Metacapitalism. His new book project is a study of the history of imagination in late antiquity and Byzantium (Postclassical Imaginaries: A Cognitive Anthropology of Late Antique and Medieval Greek Phantasia).
Professor Roilos has co-founded and co-edits the book series Cultural Politics, Socioaesthetics, Beginnings and Harvard Early Modern and Modern Greek Library. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the international research project Poetics before Modernity: Literary Criticism from Antiquity to the Enlightenment. He also serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Oral Tradition.
He is the chair of the Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on Modern Greek Studies. He is a Faculty Associate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA). He is the co-founder and co-chair of the Research Seminar “Cultural Politics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” at WCFIA.
Professor Roilos is a member of the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies; of the Byzantine Studies Steering Committee; and of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology. He has also been a member of the Committee on Freshman Seminars for many years.
His numerous invited lectures include the 2007 Opening Lecture at the Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, DC), the 2009 European Commission Lecture in Greek Culture (co-sponsored by Dumbarton Oaks), the inaugural lecture of the Circle of Hellenic Academics in Boston (2014), and lectures at the Delphi Economic Forum.
In addition to his teaching in the field of modern Greek Studies (e.g. on the Nazis and the Greeks and the occupation of Greece by the "axis" powers; C. P. Cavafy; Nikos Kazantzakis; modernism; Greek world literature; the Greek historical novel; the history of Greek literature and culture from the 15th c. to the present), Professor Roilos offers courses on literary and cultural theory, comparative poetics, cognitive humanities, and reception studies, including seminars on hyperreality; the history of imagination from Plato to Castoriadis; "ritual poetics"; irony; allegory; oral literature; Greek antiquity and modern philosophical thought and critical/cultural theory.