Alexandros Velaoras

Alexandros Velaoras is a PhD candidate at the University of Patras. He has earned BA degrees in English Literature and Culture, French Language and Literature, and Classics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the University of Patras; and MA degrees in Renaissance English Literature from the University of Sussex, UK and in European Literature and Culture from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The title of his PhD thesis-in-progress is “The Arrival of the Xenos in Euripidean Tragedy”. His doctoral research focuses on the outsider as a convention in Euripidean tragedy and is informed by political theory and political philosophy. He is currently exploring the apparatus (the Foucauldian dispositif) of death and the necropolitics of classical Athens. His research interests also include Classical reception in Anglophone and Francophone literature.

He has presented (or is to present) papers in workshops and conferences in Greece and abroad and he has co-organized (with Professor Marion Meyer, University of Vienna, Italy; and Associate Professor Efimia Karakantza, University of Patras) the panel “Ancient Necropolitics: Politicizing Death and the Dead in Ancient Greece” for the International Conference in Classics and Ancient History (Coimbra, Portugal; postponed).

During his CHS–IOA fellowship, he will explore the ways in which Euripidean tragedy employs the theme of ἆθλοι and how it adapts it to fit the specifications of the genre and the ideology of the polis.