The Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation invites you to watch online the new episode of the “Talk to me Historically” series, titled “Familiar landscapes in a “strange new country”; British female travel writers in Colonial Cyprus”. Dr Margarita Ioannou & Dr Katerina Gotsi will give this new lecture which, as of the 10th of September, will be added to the online action.
Lecture topic:
The aim of this study is to demonstrate the process of conceptualization of Cyprus as a British colony from 1878 to 1924 through travel accounts written by British diplomats or colonial officers’ spouses who followed their husbands to all their government postings. Emphasis is placed on the ways in which their travel accounts reflect or reproduce the British colonial rhetoric. Female travel writers experienced Cyprus as a garden that had been entrusted to the care of the British Empire. In their texts, this image of the garden took various forms, depending on each author’s agenda and point of view. This research falls within the scope of the program Re-inventing age-old Travelling Paths of the Levant in the Digital Era: the example of Cyprus (ReTraPath). The Project EXCELLENCE/0918/0190 is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the Republic of Cyprus through the Research and Innovation Foundation
Short resume of the speaker:
Margarita Ioannou was born in Nicosia in 1985. She studied Greek Philology at the University of Cyprus (2003-2008), and she also earned an M.A. in Modern Greek Philology from the University of Cyprus. In December 2013, she submitted her doctoral dissertation “‘A Thoroughly Fervent Supporter of the Letters’: Petrakes Carides, A Scholar in the Period of Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment” to the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Cyprus. She was a fellow researcher at the Kostas and Eleni Ourani Foundation of Athens (2012-2013), and she also worked as a Scientific Assistant at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies of the University of Cyprus (January-May 2012). She has taught courses in Modern Greek Literature and Greek as a Second Language (Greek for Foreigners) at the Department of Pre-Primary Education of the Frederick University (2014). She participated in the research projects of the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Cyprus (2009-2012) and of the Center of Cultural Heritage (Nicosia, Cyprus, 2017 onwards). Her research interests lie in the areas of Literature of the European Enlightenment, Modern Greek Literature (17th-19th centuries), Travel Literature (15th-20th centuries), Editions and Bibliography, History of Books, History of Ideas and Cultural History. She has also published several papers in Greek and English in academic journals and collected volumes and has been the editor of several books and a monograph. She is currently working as a Postdoctoral Fellow (Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation) in the framework of EXCELLENCE/0918/0190: Re-inventing age-old Travelling Paths of the Levant in the Digital Era: the example of Cyprus (ReTraPath).
Katerina Gotsi is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre of Scientific Dialogue and Research, Cyprus, and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Greek and Latin, University College London. She currently works on the EU funded research programme EXCELLENCE/0918/0190: Re-inventing age-old Travelling Paths of the Levant in the Digital Era: the example of Cyprus (ReTraPath). She holds a BA in English Studies (University of Athens), a BA in Theatre Studies (University of Athens), an Msc in Comparative and General Literature (University of Edinburgh) and a PhD in Comparative Literature (University College London). She is currently studying towards an MA in Digital Culture (University of Piraeus). She has published scholarly articles in Greek and English journals and has presented papers at international conferences and symposia (organized by, among other bodies, the University of Oxford, University of London, Durham University, University of Athens, Ryerson University, Canada, and the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation). In addition, she has conducted a series of interviews with prominent Irish writers and theatre practitioners (including, among others, Seamus Heaney, Stephen Rea, Brendan Kennelly, Declan Donnellan, Fiona Shaw, and Frank McGuinness), which are hosted at the Archives of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) on the University of Oxford website (http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/katerina-gotsi-interviews, work in progress). She has also written theatre reviews for the Cypriot magazine Apopsi and the website playstosee.com, while her first play Rydal Water received a distinction from the Scriptwriters’ Guild of Greece and Michael Cacoyannis Foundation. Her research interests include the modern reception of Greek tragedy, travel writing past and present, and the exploitation of digital applications in culture and education.
