BOLETSI MARIA
Maria Boletsi is Endowed Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam (Marilena Laskaridis Chair) and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Leiden University. Born in Corfu and raised in Thessaloniki, she studied Greek Philology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki before moving to the Netherlands in 2001, where she pursued studies in Comparative Literature (BA) and Cultural Analysis (MA) at the University of Amsterdam and completed her doctoral degree (cum laude) at Leiden University in 2010 with the dissertation Barbarism Otherwise: Studies in Literature, Art, and Theory.
Her work moves across the fields of Modern Greek literature and culture, comparative literature, literary and cultural theory, conceptual history, and cultural analysis. Through interdisciplinary approaches that combine close engagement with literary texts and other cultural objects with broader cultural and political inquiries, she explores how concepts, narratives, and cultural imaginaries shape the ways we understand the world and envision alternative futures. Boletsi has published extensively on Modern Greek literature and culture, with emphasis on the work of C.P. Cavafy, as well as on the concepts of barbarism, spectrality, crisis, utopia, and the weird. Her research frequently brings Greek literary and cultural production into dialogue with wider transnational and theoretical debates, highlighting the place of Greece and the Mediterranean within global conversations.
Her current work focuses on the concept and genre of the weird and its contemporary manifestations in literature, ecology, and politics. She is currently also co-authoring a book on alternative island imaginaries in Greece and beyond, exploring how islands can help us rethink contemporary intersecting crises, modes of coexistence, and future narratives.
Boletsi has held fellowships and visiting appointments at institutions including Princeton University, Columbia University, the University of Geneva, the University of Bonn, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). She is co-founder of Greek Studies Now, an international network that sprang from the modern Greek studies communities at Oxford and Amsterdam, dedicated to promoting a broad understanding of Modern Greek Studies in its entwinement with other fields and transnational cultural and sociopolitical debates.
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