Panagiotis Roilos

Professor Roilos is the President of the European Cultural Center of Delphi, a major cultural institute in Europe, which functions under the auspices of the Council of Europe and the supervision of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. He is a member of the Governing Board of the Hellenic Harvard Foundation. He is a Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCIA); a member of the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies; of the Byzantine Studies Steering Committee; and of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the international research project Poetics before Modernity: Literary Criticism from Antiquity to the Enlightenment. He also serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Oral Tradition.

Professor Roilos has been offered a Forschungsstipendium für erfahrene Wissenschaftler from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and has been a Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. He is the founder and director of the Delphi Academy of European Studies and of the international cultural forum Delphi Dialogues. He was a member of the “Greece 2021” honorary Committee of the Hellenic Republic, whose activities marked the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution, and serves on the Advisory Board of the research and policy institute Dianeosis. He has been awarded an Honorary PhD from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens.

Professor Roilos’s publications and research interests center upon postclassical Greek literature and culture, cognitive humanities, comparative poetics, reception studies, medieval and modern literary theory, ritual studies, orality and literacy,. He has conducted extensive fieldwork on traditional oral literature in South Italy as well as in Crete and the Peloponnese.

He is the author of the books C. P. Cavafy: The Economics of Metonymy (2009; Greek edition, 2016); Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel (2005); Towards a Ritual Poetics (2003; co-author with D. Yatromanolakis; Greek edition, with a preface by Marcel Detienne entitled "For an Anthropological Approach," 2005; Italian edition, with a preface by Marcel Detienne, 2014); and, more recently, of “Lamenting Greece”: On Early German Philhellenism (16th and 17th Centuries) (in Greek; forthcoming). His major publications include also the books Greek Ritual Poetics (co-editor; 2005); Imagination and Logos: Essays on C.P. Cavafy (editor; 2010); Medieval Greek Storytelling: Fictionality and Narrative in Byzantium (editor; 2014); Mythogenesis, Interdiscursivity, Ritual (co-editor with Burkhard Fehr; 2024); From Byzantium to the Early Greek Enlightenment: Books, Writers, and Ideologies in Early Modern Greek Contexts (editor; forthcoming). In collaboration with Dimitrios Yatromanolakis he has published the expanded and revised English (2002) and the expanded and revised Greek edition (2002) of Margaret Alexiou's The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge 1974). He is co-author/co-editor of Robert McCabe: Greece after the War—The Years of Hope (2023). He is currently completing a book on digital posthumanism, the crisis of representation, and democracy entitled Neomedieval Metacapitalism. His new book project is a study of the history of imagination in late antiquity and Byzantium (Postclassical Imaginaries: A Cognitive Anthropology of Late Antique and Medieval Greek Phantasia).

Professor Roilos has co-founded and co-edits the book series Harvard Early Modern and Modern Greek Library and Cultural Politics, Socioaesthetics, Beginnings.

He is the chair of the Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on Modern Greek Studies and co-chairs the Seminar “Cultural Politics" at WCIA.