Stathis Gourgouris

Stathis Gourgouris is a poet, essayist, translator, sound artist, and professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature & Society. He is the author of Dream Nation (1996; 25th Anniversary edition, 2021); Does Literature Think? (2003); Lessons in Secular Criticism (2013); The Perils of the One (2019); Nothing Sacred (2024), and editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (2010); Thinking with Balibar (2020); and The Cavafy Dossier (2021). He has published numerous articles on ancient Greek philosophy, political theory, modern poetics, film, contemporary music, and psychoanalysis. He writes regularly in internet media (Los Angeles Review of Books, OpenDemocracy; Al Jazeera;), as well as major Greek newspapers and journals on political and cultural matters. A collection of such essays on poetics and politics, written in Greek over a period of 25 years, was published as Ενδεχομένως αταξίες [Contingent Disorders, 2016].

He is an internationally awarded poet, with four volumes of poetry published in Greek and translated into all the major European languages as well as Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Hindi. His poetry, music, and visual art collaborations have been performed in various festivals including UKS Archives in Oslo, ICA in London, documenta 14 in Athens, Thessaloniki Megaron Mousikis, SynTalk in Mumbai, STUDIOvisits Gallery in Berlin, Ambersand International Art Gallery in San Francisco, and 4th International Poetry Festival in Sapanca, Turkey. He is a member of the Hellenic Authors Society, an Honorary Member of PEN Greece, and co-founder of the Sublamental Artists Collective.

Currently serving as Director of the Program in Hellenic Studies, he has also served as Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (2009-15); the Program of Psychoanalytic Studies (2017-22); Advisory Board, C.P. Cavafy Archive, Alexander S. Onassis Foundation (2017-); President of the Modern Greek Studies Association (2006-12); Board of Supervisors of the English Institute, Harvard University (2006-09). He was co-curator of the Onassis Foundation funded Cavafy Festival in NYC (2023) and currently (with Neni Panourgiá) of the Leros Humanism Seminars project (2023-). He has been honored with a number of fellowships and awards (Guggenheim, Mellon, NEH, Wright-Ingraham, Fundacion César Egido Serrano) in addition with the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award (2015).

An extensive interview covering the entire range of his work can be found in Los Angeles Review of Books: Part I “Dream Nation and the Phantasm of Europe”; Part II “Poetics and the Political World”.