Notes on Contributors
Eirini Afentoulidou
is Research Associate at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Institute for Medieval Research, Division of Byzantine Research). She specializes in Byzantine language and literature, and Byzantine liturgical texts. She is preparing a critical edition of the Dioptra.
Gianfranco Agosti
is Associate Professor of Classical and Late Antique Philology at the Sapienza University of Rome. He published two editions of Nonnos of Panopolis’ poems—Paraphrasis, Canto 5 (2003); Dionysiaca, Canti 25–39 (2013)—and he has written extensively on late antique and early Byzantine literature, art, epigraphy, and religion. He is currently preparing a book on late antique education and a monograph on late antique Greek metrical inscriptions.
Roderick Beaton
is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London. He specializes in Greek literature, history and culture from the 12th century to the present day. His books include The Medieval Greek Romance (1996), George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel (2003), Byron’s Greece: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (2013) and Greece: Biography of a Modern Nations (2019).
Floris Bernard
is Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek and Byzantine Literature at Ghent University. His book Writing and Reading Byzantine Secular Poetry, 1025–1081 discusses the relationship between poetry and society in 11th-century Byzantium. He also coordinates a database of Byzantine book epigrams (www.dbbe.ugent.be).
Carolina Cupane
is University Lecturer at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Vienna, as well as Senior Research Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Institute for Medieval Studies, Division of Byzantine Research). Her research focuses on Byzantine vernacular literature, Byzantine narrative, comparative literature, cultural studies, cultural mobility and the migration of narrative motifs between East and West. She is the author of numerous publications on these topics and has also edited (together with Bettina Krönung) the Brill Companion to Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond (2016). She also edited and translated a selection of Late Byzantine vernacular romances (Romanzi cavallereschi bizantini, 1995) into Italian.
Kristoffel Demoen
is Professor of Ancient and Medieval Greek Literature at Ghent University. His research interests are related to the transmission, transformation and adaptation of the ancient literary and cultural tradition, especially in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period. He is currently working on the edition and commentary of the 10th-century Paradeisos.
Ivan Drpić
is Associate Professor of Byzantine Αrt Ηistory at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include the interplay between the visual and the verbal, medieval aesthetics and theories of the image, the agency of art objects, the history of subjectivity, and the cultural interactions between Byzantium and the Slavic world. Drpić is the author of Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium (2016), and is currently working on a book exploring the nexus of materiality, subjectivity, and the power of things in Byzantine culture.
Jürgen Fuchsbauer
is a Slavist working at the University of Innsbruck. He specializes in the history and older literature of the South and East Slavonic languages, as well as on text editions.
Antonia Giannouli
is Associate Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Cyprus. Her research interests focus on religious poetry, especially hymnography and commentaries on hymns, exegetical didaskaliai, rhetoric, and critical editions of Byzantine texts. Her publications include Die beiden byzantinischen Kommentare zum Großen Kanon des Andreas von Kreta. Eine quellenkritische und literarhistorische Studie (2007), and the edited volume From Manuscripts to Books—Vom Codex zur Edition (ed. with E. Schiffer, 2011).
Martin Hinterberger
is Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Cyprus. He specializes in the language of Byzantine literature, emotion in Byzantine literature, and Byzantine (auto)biographical writing. His recent publications include Phthonos. Mißgunst, Neid und Eifersucht in der byzantinischen Literatur (2013) and the edited volume The Language of Byzantine Learned Language (2014).
Wolfram Hörandner
is Emeritus Professor of Byzantine Literature at the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies of the University of Vienna. Moreover, he is Senior Research Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Institute for Medieval Studies, Division of Byzantine Research). His research activity covers various aspects of Byzantine literature, mainly poetry and rhetoric. His most important publications include Theodoros Prodromos, Historische Gedichte (1974), Der Prosarhythmus in der rhetorischen Literatur der Byzantiner (1981), and Forme et Fonction. Remarques sur la poésie dans la société byzantine (2017).
Elizabeth Jeffreys
is Emeritus Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, and Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. She has published widely on topics in Byzantine literature; recent publications include Four Byzantine Novels (2012) and “A Constantinopolitan poet views Frankish Antioch”, Crusades 14 (2015).
Michael Jeffreys
studied classics at Cambridge (UK) and then completed a PhD on the border of Byzantine Studies and Modern Greek at the University of London, while teaching in a London school. After postdoctoral work in the US and Greece, he was appointed Lecturer in Modern Greek at the University of Sydney, Australia, where he took part in the extraordinary flowering of Greek education there in the late 1970s and the 1980s, and was elected Sir Nicholas Laurantus Professor of Modern Greek at Sydney. After taking early retirement at the end of millennium he returned to the UK and has been doing research at Oxford, largely in Byzantine Studies.
Marc D. Lauxtermann
is Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature, and Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford University. He has written extensively on Byzantine poetry and metre, and is the co-editor of a recent book on the letters of Psellos. Further research interests include translations of oriental tales in Byzantium, the earliest grammars and dictionaries of vernacular Greek, and the development of the Greek language in the 18th century.
Ingela Nilsson
is Professor of Greek and Byzantine Studies at Uppsala University and Director of the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (2019–21). She has published widely on questions of literature, narrative and imitation in Byzantium, with a special focus on the 12th century. Her most recent publications include the edited volumes Storytelling in Byzantium: Narratological Approaches to Byzantine Texts and Images (ed. with Ch. Messis and M. Mullett) and Reading the Late Byzantine Romance: A Handbook (ed. with A. Goldwyn), both published in 2018.
Emilie van Opstall
is Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She specializes in Late Antique and Byzantine poetry, among others John Geometres’ hexameters and elegiacs: Jean Géomètre. Poèmes en hexamètres et en distiques élégiaques (2008). Her recent publications include the interdisciplinary volume Sacred Thresholds. The Door to the Sanctuary in Late Antiquity (2018).
Andreas Rhoby
works at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Medieval Research, where he is deputy head of the Division of Byzantine Research. In addition, he is a Privatdozent at the University of Vienna and chair of the commission Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, and one of the coordinators of the commission Inscriptiones Graecae Aevi Byzantinae of the Association Internationale des Études Byzantines. He has published extensively on Byzantine inscriptional epigrams (4 vols.: 2009–2018) and on other topics of Byzantine cultural history.
Kurt Smolak
is Emeritus Professor of Classical Philology, Late and Medieval Latin at the University of Vienna. His research is concerned with Late and Medieval Latin poetry, with a special focus on Prudentius, Biblical Epics, Carmina Burana, Medieval Comedy and the Ovidian tradition up to the present time. He also works on Early Byzantine poets (e.g. Gregory of Nazianzus, Synesius, and Nonnos) and Neolatin authors (especially Erasmus). He is the main editor of the periodical Wiener Studien. He is ordinary member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, for which he was coordinating the Commission for editing the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum from 2001 to 2012. He is also a corresponding member of the Academia Pontaniana in Naples.
Foteini Spingou
is a Research Associate in Comparative Byzantine Studies at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh. She is a cultural historian with a particular interest in the intersection between art and literature. She currently finalizes the first full edition of the anonymous poetry in the Anthologia Marciana.
Maria Tomadaki
is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Literary Studies of Ghent University. She specializes in Byzantine poetry, textual criticism and the reception of ancient poets in Byzantium. In her PhD thesis, defended at the University of Thessaloniki (2014), she prepared a critical edition of 236 iambic poems by John Geometres.
Ioannis Vassis
is Professor of Medieval Greek Literature at Aristotle, University of Thessaloniki. He specializes in Byzantine poetry, and his recent publications include Leon Magistros Choirosphaktes, Chiliostichos Theologia (2002); Initia Carminum Byzantinorum (2005); and, together with Ioannis Polemis, A Greek Exile in 12-Century Malta. The Poem of the Ms. Matritensis BN 4577. A New Critical Edition with Translation and Notes (in Greek) (2016).
Nikos Zagklas
is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Literature at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies of the University of Vienna. His research interests are concerned with Byzantine literary culture, with a particular interest in poetry and didactic literature. He is currently working on a new edition of a group of poems by Theodore Prodromos.