Aspasia Velissariou is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
She holds a B.A. in English Literature and received her M.A. (1979) and Ph.D. (1982) from the University of Essex. She has also taught English Literature and comparative drama as a part-time lecturer and a Lecturer at the University of Thessaloniki (1985-92). Since 1992, when she was appointed Assistant Professor in the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, she has been teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses in English drama and fiction, comparative drama, political theory and seventeenth-century English drama and Irish drama. Her research interests include seventeenth-century English drama, political and gender theory and theory of ideology and culture.
She has published essays on Beckett, Synge, Ibsen, Modern Greek drama, Wycherley, Congreve, Behn, Vanbrough, Dryden, Shakespeare, Jacobean tragedy in journals. These include The Journal of Beckett Studies, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, Themes in Drama (CUP), Restoration, Modern Greek Studies Yearbook, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, PLL, Cahiers Elisabethains, Restoration and 18th-century Theatre Research, Bulletin de la société d’études Anglo-Américaines des XIIe et XVIII siècles, Journal of Short Story in English, Gender Studies, Global Discourse, EMLS. She has also published in edited volumes: Aphra Behn and her Female Successors, ed. Margarete RubiK (Lit Verlag, 2011) and in Performing the Renaissance Body, eds. Sidia Fiorato and John Drakakis in Law and Literature 11 (De Gruyter, 2016). She has written three monographs: Discourses of Power and Truth in Wycherley’s Drama (Athens, 1991), Congreve and the Politics of Comedy (Athens, 1997) and Female Sexual Transgression in Jacobean Tragedy (Athens, 2001). She is a reviewer for Restoration and Global Discourse, and for ten years she was vice-president of Nikos Poulantzas Institute.