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Professor of Comparative Literature and Classical Studies
Professor C.P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek

• About

  Fields of Study:

  Modern Greek culture; classical reception; civic ethics and democratic politics; tragedy and the tragic; word and music.

  Vassilis Lambropoulos received the Ph.D. in Byzantine & Modern Greek from the University of Thessaloniki in 1980 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 1999.  He is the author of Literature as National Institution:  Studies in the Politics of Modern Greek Criticism (1988), The Rise of Eurocentrism:  Anatomy of Interpretation (1993) and The Tragic Idea (2006) and has co-edited the volumes The Text and Its Margins:  Post-Structuralist Approaches to Twentieth-Century Greek Literature (Pella, 1985) and Twentieth-Century Literary Theory:  An Introductory Anthology (State University of New York Press, 1987), and a special issue of the journal October, "The Humanities as Social Technology" (1990), and edited a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly, “Ethical Politics” (1996).  He is the recipient of a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Greek National Scholarship Foundation (University of Birmingham 1979-81), a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1992-93), an Ohio State University Distinguished Scholar Award (1994), the Michigan Humanities Award (2005), an Outstanding Professor of the Year Award (Office of Greek Life, University of Michigan, 2005), and the Nikos Kazantzakis Award (Pancretan Association of America, 2006).  He has delivered various endowed lectures, and served two terms as Vice President of the Modern Greek Studies Association.  His ongoing projects include a book on hubris in modern tragedy, specifically, the self-destruction of revolution from Schiller to Weiss and Genet.  Teaching interests in Comparative Literature include undergraduate courses on Greek myth in film and graduate seminars on Close Reading, Scholarly Debates, and Radical Theory.  
  

  Select Publications:

  • Literature as National Institution: Studies in the Politics of Modern Greek Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1988).
  • The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation (Princeton University Press, 1993).
  • The Tragic Idea (Duckworth 2006).
  • The Text and Its Margins: Post-Structuralist Approaches to Twentieth-Century Greek Literature (Pella, 1985).
  • Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthology (State University of New York Press, 1987).
  • “On the Notion of the Tragedy of Culture,” in Agon, Logos, Polis:  The Greek Achievement and its Aftermath, ed. Johann P. Arnason & Peter Murphy (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001), 233-55.   
  • “Classics in Performance,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20: 2 (Fall 2002): 191-213.
  • “Must We Keep Talking about ‘the Balkans’?” Greece and the Balkans:  Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment, ed. Dimitris Tziovas (Oxford:  Ashgate, 2003), 265-7.
  • “The Greeks of Art and the Greeks of History,” Modern Greek Studies Journal of Australia & New Zealand 11-12 (2004): 66-74.
  • “Stumbling over the ‘Boundary Stone of Greek Philosophy’:  Two Centuries of Translating the Anaximander Fragment,” in Festschrift for John P. Kozyris (Athens:  Ant. N. Sakkoulas, 2007), 193-210.
  • “Humanism between Hubris and Heroism,” in Humanism and the Global Hybrid, ed. Mina Karavanta and Nina Morgan (Newcastle UK:  Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 158-73.
  • “The Rehearsal of Antiquity in Post-modern Greek Fiction,” in A Singular Antiquity:  Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in Twentieth-Century Greece, ed. Dimitris Plantzos and Dimitris Damaskos, eds.: (Athens:  Benaki Museum, 2008), 163-71.
  • “Governance, Hubris, and Justice in Modern Tragedy,” Thesis Eleven 93 (May 2008): 22-35.
  • “Unbuilding the Acropolis in Greek Literature,” in Classics and National Culture, ed. Susan Stephens and Phiroze Vasunia (Oxford University Press, 2010), 182-98.
  • “Farewell to the Revolution!” in Manolis Anagnostakis: Poetry and Politics, Silence and Agency in Post-War Greece, ed. Vangelis Calotychos (Madison:  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), 115-30.

   

• Education

  • B.A. University of Athens 1975
    Ph.D., Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, University of Thessaloniki 1980