I am a Professor in English Literature and Culture at the Department of English Language and Literature, The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University and my doctoral research was on the description of works of art (ekphrasis) in Renaissance epic poetry. I taught as a postgraduate teaching assistant at NYU for four years and was awarded the Anais Nin scholarship for my research. From 1992 to 1994, I lectured in English Literature at the University of Cyprus, returning to Athens to teach at Deree, the American College of Greece. Since 1999, when I was appointed lecturer in English at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, I have been teaching graduate and postgraduate courses on English poetry, early modern drama, travel writing and on the influence of Greece on English literature. I have also taught at the EU-funded interdepartmental postgraduate program in Lexicography and at the interdepartmental postgraduate program in Translation Studies.
My research focuses on classical echoes in English literature, word and image in early modern literature and on travel literature, examining travellers to Greece. I am currently working as P.I. on a research project entitled “Representations of Modern Greece in Modern Victorian Culture” (REVICTO) and as a research team member in another project, "Hotels and the Modern Subject: 1890-1940" (HOTEMS), both funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI-ΕΛΙΔΕΚ, 2019-2022)
I have published essays on Marlowe, Shakespeare, Gosson, Sandys, Chapman, Sidney, and on British travellers to Greece in journals and edited volumes. My monograph Greece in Early English Travel Writing, 1586-1682 was published in the New Transculturalisms series (Palgrave Macmillan) in 2017 and Troilus and Cressida, a Critical Reader, in the Continuum Renaissance Drama series (Bloomsbury) in 2019; in the same year I co-edited Ruins in the Anglo-American Literary and Cultural Imagination published by Palgrave Macmillan. I have also co-edited the volumes Women Writing Greece: Essays in Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel (Rodopi, 2008), In the Country of the Moon: British Women Travellers to Greece 1718-1932 (Estia, 2005), The Letter of the Law: Literature, Justice and the Other (Peter Lang, 2013), and The Periphery Viewing the World (Parousia Publications, 2004). My research on travel writing has appeared in Studies in Travel Writing, Restoration, Literature Compass, Mosaic, in Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century (Ashgate, 2004), Inside Out: Women Appropriating, Negotiating and Subverting Space (Rodopi, 2008), Travel, Discovery, Transformation (Transaction-Routledge, 2014),The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies (2021), and my books have been reviewed in Women’s Studies, Studies in Travel Writing, Modern Language Review, Cahiers Élisabéthains, Terrae Incognitae, Historein, Year's Work in English Studies and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. I have co-edited special issues of the journals EJES ("Narratives of Religious Conversion from the Enlightenment to the Present", with Ludmilla Kostova) and Synthesis (“Hellenism Unbound” with Amy Muse). Recent articles include "Richard II in Athens" (Cahiers Élisabéthains, 2019), "'Buried among the ruins': Gissing and the Sorcery of Athens" (Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, 2021), "Real and imagined Greek women in Victorian perceptions of ‘1821’" with A. Despotopoulou (Journal of Greek Media & Culture, 2021) and "Revolutionary Greece in Victorian Literature" (Literature Compass, 2022), also with A. Despotopoulou. I am currently co-editing the volume Hotel Modernisms (Routledge, forthcoming in 2023).
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Efterpi_Mitsi Efterpi Mitsi on ResearchGate