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, early modern drama, word and image, and on travel literature, examining travellers to Greece. I was the Principa Investigator in the research project “Representations of Modern Greece in Modern Victorian Culture” (REVICTO) https://revictoproject.com/ and a research team member in "Hotels and the Modern Subject: 1890-1940" (HOTEMS) https://hotems.enl.uoa.gr/, both funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI-ΕΛΙΔΕΚ, 2019-2023).
I have published essays on Marlowe, Shakespeare, Gosson, Sandys, Chapman, Sidney, and on British travellers to Greece in peer-reviewed 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 has appeared in Studies in Travel Writing, Word and image, Cahiers Élisabéthains, Restoration, Literature Compass, Mosaic, and other journals. 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). My most recent publications include the volume Hotel Modernisms (Routledge, 2023), co-edited with A. Despotopoulou and V. Kolocotroni and an article on Dilys Powell (Studies in Travel Writing, 2023). I have just completed a forthcoming volume with A. Despotopoulou entitled Victorians and Modern Greece: Literary and Cultural Encounters, British School at Athens Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies Series, Routledge, and a special issue on Shakespeare ("The art itself is nature”: Shakespeare’s Nature, Art, Politics) with X. Georgopoulou, to appear in Cahiers Elisabéthains, July 2024.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Efterpi_Mitsi Efterpi Mitsi on ResearchGate
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0965-656X