Mina Karavanta

Mina Karavanta is Associate Professor of Theory, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and Global English Literatures in the Department of English Language and Literature, School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Language and Literature (Arista/Distinction), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, a Master’s degree and a Doctoral Degree in Comparative Literature, State University of New York at Binghamton.

She was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship (1995-1996); the Papadaki scholarship from the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens (1995-1999); full Tuition Waiver and scholarship , Department of Comparative Literature, State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton (1995-1999); the Dissertation Year Fellowship (1998-1999) and the University Award for Excellence in Research (1998-1999) from SUNY at Binghamton.

She specializes in postcolonial and decolonial studies, deconstruction (Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy),  comparative literature, Black British Literature, Caribbean Literature and Global Anglophone Literature. Her research currently focuses on migration and decolonial studies. Her forthcoming monograph is entitled Migrations of the Human, Decolonial Subjectivities in the Long Present (under contract with Liverpool University Press). 

She has published her work in international academic journals such as boundary 2, Callaloo, Feminist Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic, Symplokē, Journal Of Contemporary Theory. Her work has also appeared in edited volumes abroad and in Greece. She has co-edited Interculturality and Gender, with Joan Anim-Addo & Giovanna Covi, (London: Mango Press, 2009); Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid, with Nina Morgan (London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008); and a special issue of Symploke on "Posthumanisms" with Nathan Snaza (Vol. 23, No 1-2, 2016).

She has translated George Steiner’s Heidegger into Greek (Athens: Patakis, 2009), and Haris Vlavianos’s poetry into English, Affirmation: Selected Poems 1986-2006 (Dublin: Dedalus: 2007).

She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of the Faculty of English Language and Literature and the Interdepartmental Postgraduate Translation Program of the School of Philosophy of the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has also been invited to teach in the UK, the US, France, Grenada (Caribbean) and Cyprus. From 2009 to 2014 she was a member of the interdisciplinary research group Travelling Concepts (ATHENA, European Thematic Network) and a co-ordinator of the research subgroup Interculturality and Gender. From 2011 to 2014 she was a research participant in “Behind the Looking-Glass: ‘“Other”-Cultures-within’ translating cultures,” an interdisciplinary network funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Grant) and co-ordinated by Professor Joan Anim-Addo (University of London, Goldsmiths). 

She is the coordinator of the international CIVIS research network and Blended Intensive Program, Postracial Transmodernities: Afro-European Relations, Mediterranean Trajectories and Intercultural Reciprocities (https://civis.eu/en/civis-courses/postracial-transmodernities-afro-european-relations-mediterranean-trajectories-and-intercultural-reciprocities). 

She has participated in international conferences and given invited talks as a visiting professor and has held posts as an international scholar in residence in the US at Washington University 2014, Towson University, April 2019), in France at the École normale supérieure/PSL in 2023,  https://www.translitterae.psl.eu/mina-karavanta/; and in Cyprus at the University of Cyprus in 2015. She has also taught and given invited talks in Grenada and Australia (AHRC Research Network).

She is a founding member and co-editor of the international and blind peer-reviewed electronic journal Synthesis: an anglophone journal of comparative literary studies that publishes transcultural and interdisciplinary research and features international Editorial and Academic Boards (15 issues, 2008 to the present).

Recent Special Issues she has co-edited as a General Editor:  No. 15 (2022): Re-Storying the World for Multispecies Survival (Special Issue Editor: Mayako Murai); No. 14 (2021): Dissident Self-Narratives: Radical and Queer Life Writing (Special Issue Editor: Aude Haffen); No. 13 (2020): Just art. Documentary Poetics and Justice (Special Issue Editor: Naomi Toth).

Selected book chapters:

“Fugitive Sovereignties in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy: Deconstructing the "Unparalleled Catastrophe" of the Human.” Trauma and Literature in an Age of Globalization. Eds. Jennifer Ballengee & David Kelman. New York & London: Routledge, 2021.

Forthcoming publications: 

“Archipelagic Thought” as World Literature: Glissant, Wynter and Derrida’s Genres of the World." Theory as World Literature. Ed. Jeffrey Di Lio. Bloomsbury, forthcoming. 

“Spectres of the Aegean: Decolonial Subjectivities in the Long Present. Decoloniality in the Break of Global Blackness. Eds. Patricia Northover & Michaeline A. Crichlow. Routledge, forthcoming.

“Transforming the Colonial Scene of Writing the Native: Erna Brodber’s Nothing’s Mat and the Poetics of the Nothing”. Slavery, Memory and Literature. Eds. Karen-Margrethe Simonse et al. John Benjamins Publishing Company, forthcoming. 

“Being-with without assemblage”: Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida’s Imaginary grammar of the to-come.” The World in Theory: Rethinking Globalization Through Derrida and Nancy. Eds. Birgit Kaiser, Laurens ten Kate and Philip Leonard. Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming.