Dr Christopher Jotischky

Profile

My research focuses on the role of classical antiquity in Modern Greek identity formation, with a particular interest in Greek literary and intellectual culture of the long nineteenth century. My doctoral thesis (completed at Brown University) argued that Greek elites during this period attempted to fashion themselves as a recognizably European nation through the wholesale embrace of the scientific study of antiquity typified by Western European-style Philology. The thesis – and the resulting monograph, which I am currently preparing – centres on the adoption of Latin as a compulsory subject in Greek schools and analyses the literary repercussions of this Latin culture in the Modern Greek novel. I shall conduct further research on classical influences on the linguistic characteristics of nineteenth-century Greek prose at the University of Amsterdam in Spring 2025, on a fellowship funded by the Laskaridis Foundation.

My postdoctoral research takes these same concerns and applies them to the politics of enslavement in nineteenth-century Greece. Both enslavement in Greco-Roman antiquity and the enslavement practices of the Ottoman Empire from which Greece had just been liberated appear to have combined to form a strong negative paradigm against which Greece was defined as an enlightened state free from enslavement. I am currently studying how Greek intellectuals and classicists of the period allude to institutions of enslavement in classical antiquity in order to criticize both the Ottoman Empire and the Transatlantic Trade. I hope to develop this research into a second monograph, which will be the first to discuss the reception of classical enslavement practices in Modern Greece.