Kyriakoula Tzortzopoulou
Post-doctoral researcher
SHORT PROFILE
Kyriakoula Tzortzopoulou studied Greek Philology and Classics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (BA 2013; MPhil 2016). Her Bachelor and Master’s degrees were awarded with grade "Excellent" (BA: 9.53/10, MPhil: 9.76/10), and funded by Antonios Papadakis Legacy. She pursued her PhD in Classics at King’s College London (2017-2022), under the supervision of Professor Michael Trapp and Dr Ioannis Papadogiannakis. In her doctoral thesis, "Metaphors and the Conceptualisation of Human Emotions in the 4th c. A.D.: Anger and Envy in Christian Literature", she explored the metaphorical conceptualisations of anger and envy based on texts of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom, through the lens of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. She is currently working in turning her thesis into a book. For her doctoral studies, she was awarded scholarships from the Foundation for Education and European Culture (2017-2021) and the A.G. Leventis Foundation (2018- 2021). She has taught "Introduction to Ancient Greek Literature" as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at King’s College London, and Latin and Ancient Greek at the UCL Summer School in Ancient Languages.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of Classics, Patristics and Cognitive Science, with special emphasis on the history of human emotions and distributed cognition, the intellectual and social history of Late Antiquity, and the development of Christian theology and literature under the influence of the Greco-Roman culture. She is interested in the ways recent research in philosophy of mind and cognitive science can be applied to the examination of ancient mentalities, and especially human affectivity and historical concepts of cognition.
PUBLICATIONS
“The conceptualization of envy in Gregory of Nyssa”, Studia Patristica 115 (2021) 57-68.
Review at Bryn Mawr Classical Review of the book: J. Wright (2022), Care of the Brain in Early Christianity, University of California Press (2023).
“Thinking of emotions through the senses: the moral dimension of smell and taste in early Christianity”, (forthcoming in a thematic volume about the Senses, edited in Palingenesia Series, Franz Steiner Verlag, Editors: Mario Baumann and Isabelle Künzer. This volume is a product of the conference Experiencing Smell and Taste, Dresden, 8- 10 September 2023).
“Thinking of Envy through Embodied Metaphors: The Case of Basil of Caesarea”, Journal of Cognitive Historiography (accepted and forthcoming in a special issue for Classics and Cognitive Science, M. Chriti & B. Cassell (eds.)).
"Collective Emotions and Intersubjectivity in John Chrysostom", Mnemosyne (forthcoming, accepted in March 2025).
ERC PROJECT
Intersubjective Phenomena in Early Christianity: Cognitive Approaches to Group Mind and Collective Emotions
Kyriakoula will examine what concepts of "group mind" and "collective emotions" Christian authors (1st – 4th c. CE) have had, and how they have articulated them for themselves and used them in their pastoral ministry. By focusing on the pagan/Christian interface, namely the modification of classical philosophical ideas by Christian intellectuals, she will explore the intersubjective nature of the notions of oikeiōsis and sympatheia in early Christian writings. She will also use theories of enactivism, distributed and extended cognition to study the way in which Christian authors narrativised their views about Church’s unity and its members’ communion. In addition, she will analyse comparatively the conceptualisation of group agency and intentionality in speeches of Christian (e.g., John Chrysostom) and non-Christian authors (e.g., Libanius), which provide evidence on group reactions for the same historical accounts (e.g., the Riot of the Statues in 4th c. CE). Finally, she will examine the techniques by which Christian authors structured their narrative in order to affect their audience’s constitution of folk psychology. She will thus offer the first pioneering attempt at applying modern cognitive theories to a wide variety of Christian authors (e.g., John Chrysostom, Basil of Caesaria, Augustine). These authors address Christians as members of groups (a congregation or a monastic community), aiming to develop collective emotions and a shared cognition on moral/practical and theological issues.
Her project will contribute towards a new understanding of the notion of intersubjectivity in group dynamics both on the interpersonal level of interaction and on the phenomenological level of mutual incorporation, by suggesting a novel investigation of the historical account of early Christian views within the first four centuries CE. At the same time, it will offer new insights into the narratology of collective mind and emotion, namely the narrative techniques and effect of narrative on the constitution of group mind.
Last Updated on October 16, 2025