ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU
PROFESSOR
ACADEMIC AFFILIATION AND ADDRESS
Department of English Language and Literature,
School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
University Campus, Athens 157 84, Greece
Email: adespoto@enl.uoa.gr
University personal webpage: http://scholar.uoa.gr/adespoto
ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS
1991 BA National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of English Language and Literature
1993 MPhil English, University of Oxford (Christ Church)
1998 PhD English, University of Reading. Title: “In search of the ‘chamber of consciousness’: an examination of setting in the works of Henry James”
ACADEMIC POSITIONS
2019-now Professor in English Literature and Culture in the Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
2014-2019 Associate Professor in the same Department
2006-2014 Assistant Professor in the same Department, tenure in 2010
2002-2006 Lecturer in the same Department
1998-2000 Lecturer, Boston University
FELLOWSHIP
2016-17 Associate Visiting Research Fellow, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.
FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECTS
2019-2023 Principal Investigator: “Hotels and the Modern Subject: 1890-1940” Funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI)
2019-2023 Research team member: “Representations of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Culture” Funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI)
2002-2018: Seven research projects funded by the University of Athens Research Fund ELKE.
2008-2012: Research team member: “Ιn Transit: Representing Women in Spaces of Passage” (PI: Teresa Gomez, Univ. of Alicante) funded by the Ministry of Education of Spain
TEACHING AND RESEARCH INTERESTS
Research interests: representations of public and private space in Victorian and early Modernist literature, Gender, Mobility, Henry James, Victorian literature and culture, Victorian Railways, Modernism.
Teaching interests: Victorian, Modernist, and contemporary English fiction at undergraduate and postgraduate level.
PUBLICATIONS:
MONOGRAPH:
1. Women and the Railway, 1850-1915. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press [Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series], 2015. pp. 202.
EDITED VOLUMES/JOURNAL ISSUE:
1. Victorian and Modern Greece: Literary and Cultural Encounters. With Efterpi Mitsi. Routledge, 2025.
2. Hotel Modernisms. With Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Efterpi Mitsi. Routledge, 2023.
3. Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination (co-edited with Efterpi Mitsi, Stamatina Dimakopoulou, Emmanouil Aretoulakis). With co-written introduction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
4. Transforming Henry James (co-edited with Donatella Izzo and Anna Di Biasio). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. pp. 466. With co-written introduction.
5. Henry James and the Supernatural (co-edited with Kimberly C. Reed). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. pp. 196. With co-written introduction.
6. “Experiments in/of Realism.” Special issue of the academic e-journal Synthesis 3 (2011) (co-edited with Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou). pp.140. With co-written introduction.
7. Reconstructing Pain and Joy: Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives (co-edited with Chryssoula Lascaratou and Elly Ifantidou). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. pp. 464. With co-written introduction.
ARTICLES IN PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS AND COLLECTIONS (SELECTED):
“Held to Ransom: The Adventures of Greece in Victorian Popular Fiction” in Victorians and Modern Greece: Literary and Cultural Encounters. Routledge, 2025. 117-129.
“A ‘big depressing dazzling joke’: The Limits of Hospitality in The Aspern Papers. The Henry James Review 45 (2024): 284-294.
“A Space of Her Own: Hotels in the Interwar Short Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Elizabeth Bowen” (with Chryssa Marinou). The Space Between e-journal, 19 (2023).
“Revolutionary Greece in Victorian Popular Literature” (with Efterpi Mitsi), Literature Compass (2022): 1-15.
“Real and Imagined Greek Women in Victorian Perceptions of ‘1821’” (with Efterpi Mitsi), Journal of Greek Media & Culture, special issue “‘1821’: Mediations, Receptions, Archives” 7.2 (2021): 171-186.
“‘I keep a band of music in my anteroom’: Henry James and the Sound of Introspection,” in The Sound of Henry James, ed. Leonardo Buonomo. Edizioni Universita de Trieste, 2021. 69-84.
“Hotels in Literature” (with Athanasios Dimakis and Chryssa Marinou), in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies, ed. Jeremy Tambling, Palgrave Macmillan, online in 2021. 1-11.
“Henry James’s Boston” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies, ed. Jeremy Tambling, Palgrave Macmillan, online in 2021. 1-7.
“Underwater Monuments: Iossif Ventura and the Poetry of Commemoration.” European Journal of Jewish Studies 14 (2020): 137-148.
“Flora Annie Steel’s Ecological Imagination: Narratives of Empire’s Excess.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 62.4 (2019): 502-521.
“‘Monuments of an Artless Age’: Hotels and Women’s Mobility in the Work of Henry James.” Studies in the Novel 50.4 (2018): 501-522.
“‘Terrible Traps to Memory’: National Monuments, Collective Memory, and Women in Henry James.” Modern Fiction Studies 63.3 (2017): 439-451.
“‘No natural place anywhere’: Women’s Precarious Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in James’s Novels.” The Henry James Review 35 (2014): 141-156.
“Realism” (with Matthew Beaumont). Peer-reviewed Annotated Bibliography of 123 entries, for Oxford University Press, Oxford Bibliographies Online: Victorian Literature, 2013.
“‘Running on lines’: Women and the Railway in Victorian and early Modernist Culture” in Women In Transit, ed. Teresa Gomez and Terry Gifford (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) 47-60.
“‘Mysterious Tenants’: Uncanny Women and the Private/Public Dilemma in the Supernatural Tales” in Henry James and the Supernatural (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 79-95.
“I see ghosts everywhere” (with Kimberly C. Reed). Introduction to Henry James and the Supernatural (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 1-11.
“Trains of Thought: The Challenges of Mobility in the Work of Rhoda Broughton,” Critical Survey, special issue entitled “Other Sensations” 23 (2011): 90-106.
“Gender Transfusions in George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil,’” George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies 58-59 (2010): 1-19.
“Nowhere or Somewhere? (Dis)locating Gender and Class Boundaries in Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses,” The Review of English Studies 61 (2010): 414-434.
“‘What woman was ever safe?’ Dangerous Constructions of Womanhood in The Ambassadors” in A Companion to Henry James, ed. Greg Zacharias (Blackwell, 2008). 139-155.
“‘The Abuse of Visibility’: Domestic Publicity in Late Victorian Fiction.” Inside Out: Women Appropriating, Negotiating, Subverting Public and Private Space. Ed. Teresa Gomez and Aránzazu Usandizaga. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 87-106.
“Girls on Film: Postmodern Renderings of Austen and James,” Yearbook of English Studies 36 (2006): 115-130.
“What the Freshman Knew: Jamesian Ambiguity in the International Composition Classroom” in Approaches to Teaching Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw, ed. Reed and Beidler (MLA, 2005): 169-176.
“The Monster and the Atom: Representation of London in James and Conrad,” The Cambridge Quarterly 34 (2005): 131-146.
“From Dionysus to Gorgon: Peter Shaffer’s Revision of Classical Myth and Theory,” Classical and Modern Literature 25 (2005): 85-97.
“Fanny’s Gaze and the Construction of Feminine Space in Mansfield Park,” Modern Language Review 99 (2004): 569-583.
“The Price of ‘Mere Spectatorship’: Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove,” The Review of English Studies 53 (2002): 228-244.
“Penetrating the Vitrine: Henry James and the Challenge of Publicity,” English Language Notes 38 (2002): 39-59.
“Invisible Buildings: Maggie’s Architectural Adventures in The Golden Bowl,” Papers on Language and Literature 36 (2000): 405-433.
ACADEMIC SERVICE - ADMINISTRATION
2025-27 & 2014-2016: Director of the Literature-Culture Division, Department of English, Univ. of Athens
2024-25: Chair of the Department of English, University of Athens
2022-24: Vice Chair of the Department of English, University of Athens
2018-21: Director of the Postgraduate Programme “English Language and Literature” of the Department of English, National and Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens
2017-18 & 2025-27: Associate Director of the Postgraduate Programme “English Studies: Literature and Culture” of the Department of English, Univ. of Athens
2002-2016: administrative committees in the Department of English, Univ. of Athens include: member of the postgraduate steering committee (2009-2018), the programme committee, many hiring and promotion committees, Representative of the English Department at the University of Athens Senate in 2005-6. Erasmus coordinator for Manchester Metropolitan and Oxford Brookes.
ACADEMIC ACTIVITIES, CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION
2021-23: Elected member of the Henry James Society board. President in 2023, Vice President in 2022, Secretary/Treasurer in 2021.
2023: Invited expert in the London Overground Naming Project, commissioned by the Mayor of London and the Commission for Diversity.
May-Aug. 2017: Vetter for the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions, assigned to inspect The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1883-1884, vol.1, for the award of the MLA Seal of Approval
Co-organization of conferences, symposia, and other academic events:
- Panel “Victorians and Intertemporal Greece” at the International Conference of the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association: The Nineteenth Century Today: Interdisciplinary, International, Intertemporal. Durham University 2024.
- Organized topics and panels for The Henry James Society at the ALA conference in Boston 2023 (“Jamesian Space”: 2 panels) and the MLA conference in Philadelphia in 2024 (“Henry James and Event[s]”)
- “Hotels & Crisis: Historical and Cultural Perspectives”: International workshop co-organized with the University of Guelph, Canada, London June 2022.
- “Greece in Victorian Popular Culture” International Conference, April 2022, Athens
- “Literary Hotels” International Symposium, September 2021, Athens
- 10th International Conference of HASE “Beyond the Ruin: Investigating the Fragment in English Studies” (2017).
- International Conference of HASE, “Re-Constructing Pain and Joy” (2005),
- Symposium “The Role of the Humanities in the Context of Globalization” (2004),
- Department of English postgraduate symposia and PhD presentation days.
2008-now: Member of the committee and, in 2015-2020, Vice-Chair of HASE (Hellenic Association for the Study of English)
2007- now Member of the editorial/advisory board of the journals: The Henry James Review, the European Journal of English Studies, and the e-journal Synthesis.
Peer Review for journals such as The Henry James Review, The Review of English Studies, Style, Victorian Studies, Mosaic, Studies in the Novel, Journal of Narrative Theory, Libri & Liberi, The Journal of Transport History, Atlantis, Humanities Journal, The Explicator. I have reviewed books for Oxford University Press, Routledge, Edinburgh University Press, Berghahn Books, and Cengage Gale.
2002-2011: ABELL (Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature) bibliographer for Greece and Cyprus.
RECENT CONFERENCE/SEMINAR PRESENTATIONS
7/2026 “Blooming or wired: Infrastructures of feeling in In the Cage”. 10th International Conference of the Henry James Society, Jamesian Ecosystems, Vancouver.
9/2025 Invited Speaker at the international conference: Hotels, Motels and Inns: Transient Spaces of Hospitality in English-Speaking Cultures. University of Toulouse—Jean Jaurès. Title of talk: “Hotel Temporalities”.
7/2024 “Gods or Brigands: The Myths of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Culture”. International Conference of the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association: The Nineteenth Century Today: Interdisciplinary, International, Intertemporal. Durham University.
11/2023 “Thresholds or Boundaries: Hotels in the Short Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield”, E-Motion International Conference, The Hellenic Association for the Study of English and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
07/2023 “Communities of women and the limits of hospitality in The Spoils of Poynton and The Aspern Papers.” 9th International Conference of The Henry James Society, Kyoto Japan.
06/2022 “Interwar Hotel Intimacies.” Hotels and Crisis: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, International Workshop, organized by the Univ. of Guelph and the HOTEMS Project (Univ. of Athens), London UK
4/2022 “Held to Ransom: The Adventures of Greece in Victorian Popular Fiction”. Greece in Victorian Popular Culture International Conference, Univ. of Athens
03/2022 “Unsettling women: Victorian gendered perceptions of Greece’s War of Independence”. NAVSA (North American Victorian Studies Association) conference, Vancouver (online)
12/2021 Invited speaker at the event “The Age of Railways: How the Invention of Trains Shaped European Society”, organized by the House of European History, Brussels.
12/2021 “The Re-emergence of Revolutionary Greece in Late Victorian Popular Culture” (with Efterpi Mitsi). Conference “Through the Pen of Others: Nineteenth-Century Views of Revolutionary Greece”, School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
11/2020 “In Search of War Heroines: 1821 Narratives in Victorian Periodicals.” Asking the Right Questions: Researching Victorian Greece in Digital Humanities – REVICTO Webinar, Athens.
07/2019 “‘I keep a band of music in my anteroom’: Henry James and the sound of introspection”. Henry James Society International Conference, Trieste, Italy
06/2018 “Nature’s excess: Flora Annie Steel’s ecological conscience”, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, “Measure and Excess”, Roma Tre University.
12/2017 “‘Perpetually Provisional’: Women and the Politics of Transitory Space in Henry James.” International Conference of HELAAS, “The Politics of Space,” Thessaloniki
4/2017 Invited seminar “‘No vulgar hotel’: Women and urban mobility in Henry James.” Department of English and Modern Languages Research Seminar, Oxford Brookes Univ.
4/2017 “‘Monuments of an artless age’: Hotels and women’s mobility in the work of Henry James,” “Mobilities, Literature, Culture” Conference, Univ. of Lancaster
10/2016 Invited seminar “‘Terrible Traps to Memory’: National Monuments and Women in Henry James,” American Literature Research Seminar, Rothermere American Institute, Univ. of Oxford
4/2016 “‘What is a Woman’s Country?’ Incursions of Collective Memory in Henry James,” British Library London, “Henry James and Memory” International Conference
6/2015 “Dames Seules: Railway Adventures in sensation and New Woman fiction” University of Kent, “Victorian Modernities” International Conference
5/2015 “(Un)Equal Access: Women and the Democratization of Travel in the Nineteenth Century”. Hellenic Association for the Study of English, “Rethinking Democracy in Literature, Language, and Culture” International Conference, Thessaloniki
11/2014 “‘In the Permanent Way of Civilization’: Flora Annie Steel and the Railway in India.” HELAAS international conference “The War on the Human”, Athens, Greece.
3/2013 Invited speaker “Romancing the Rails: The Liminal Spaces of Jamesian Femininity”. “Henry James: State of the Art” Symposium, University of Naples, "L’ Orientale"
6/2013 “Imperial Tracks: Women and the Railway in Spaces of Empire.” Joint BAVS, NAVSA and AVSA International Conference, Venice, Italy.
6/2012 “Daughters of London’: Women and Urban Mobility in James’s Work” at the “Placing Henry James” International Conference, London, The University of Notre Dame, London Centre.
7/2011 “‘No Natural Place Anywhere’: Women’s Precarious Mobility in James’s Novels”. At the The Fifth International Conference of the Henry James Society “Transforming Henry James”, John Cabot University, Rome.
(Last updated: October 11, 2026)
