Chrysanthos Chrysanthou
Principal Investigator
Chrysanthos S. Chrysanthou is Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Cyprus. He studied Classics at the University of Athens (2007-2011; Class Valedictorian with final average mark 9.67/10). He completed his postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford with Distinction (2012) and his Doctorate of Philosophy with no corrections at the same University (2016). His DPhil thesis was on “Narrative, Interpretation, and Moral Judgement in Plutarch’s Lives”. During his undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctorate he received scholarships and grants from the Onassis Foundation, the A.G. Leventis Foundation, the State Scholarships Foundation of Greece, the State Scholarship Foundations of Cyprus, and the DAAD.
He is the author of three monographs and numerous articles and chapters on ancient Greek historiography and biography, narratology, and cognitive classics. He was the principal investigator of a research project on “Social Minds in the Ancient Greek Novel and Imperial Greek Historiography” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) at the University of Heidelberg (2019–2022). He is also the founder and PI of the international research network “Fictional and Factual Narratives in Antiquity” funded by the Excellence Strategy of the University of Heidelberg (2019–). In 2023, he was awarded research funding of 1,49 million euros from the European Research Council (Starting Grants) for his project “Group Minds in Ancient Narrative”. In April 2024, he has unanimously been elected member of the Young Academy of Europe (https://yacadeuro.org/).
Rovertos Heller
Post-doctoral researcher
Rovertos completed his undergraduate studies in Classics at University College London. He then pursued a Master’s degree in Philosophy at the University of Athens with a thesis on the "Stoic Theory of Time and Eternal Recurrence". He proceeded to a funded PhD with the Arts and Humanities Research Council at Royal Holloway University of London under the supervision of Professor Anne Sheppard. During his PhD he undertook a research stay at Utrecht University, a hub for Stoic Studies, where he benefited from the knowledge and expertise of Prof. Dr. Teun Tieleman.
His PhD research on the Stoic theory of pneuma significantly advances our understanding of early Stoicism by elucidating how pneuma functions as both a cohesive and differentiating principle that determines the reciprocity, or lack thereof, between bodies. The manuscript is currently undergoing revision in preparation for further publication with the title Pneuma, the cosmos and its parts, natural philosophy in the early Stoa, with an expected release by the end of 2025 or early 2026.
Alongside his research, Rovertos strongly believes in education and community engagement. He has won several teaching awards from King’s College London, has been nominated for a further inclusivity award, and has transmitted his expertise to diverse audiences from advanced graduates to lay public.
Stephan Stephanides
Post-doctoral researcher
Stephan began his academic journey in 2014 as an undergraduate student in Classics at University College London, where he received the Dean’s List prize after graduating in the top 5% of students in the Humanities. Upon completing his Bachelor’s Degree in 2017, he took up an MPhil in Classics (Ancient Philosophy) at the University of Cambridge. In 2018, he was awarded with two separate awards from the Leventis Foundation and Christ’s College, Cambridge respectively to undertake his PhD in Classics (Ancient Philosophy) at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Gábor Betegh and Dr. Frisbee Sheffield. Stephan successfully defended his thesis in 2022 and subsequently graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy in the summer of 2023. During the Fall of 2023, he led an interdisciplinary seminar on "Ancient and Medieval Philosophy" at Birkbeck University, where he assumed the role of Associate Tutor for the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences.
His PhD thesis, entitled "From Conflict to Unity: Plato on Well-Ordered Wholes", re-examines the subject of parts and wholes in Platonic philosophy and argues that Plato’s conceptual apparatus for elucidating the coherence of complex wholes comprised of disparate parts (pertinent examples of which include the soul, the human animal composed of body and soul, the city, and the world) improves over time from dialogues such as Gorgias and Republic and culminates in dialogues from Plato’s later period such as Statesman, Timaeus, Philebus and Laws.
Kyriakoula Tzortzopoulou
Post-doctoral researcher
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.
Byron Waldron
Post-doctoral researcher
Byron Waldron is an Australian classicist and historian who has produced studies on Middle Republican and Late Antique Roman history and historiography, Roman Imperial ideology, panegyric & invective, and Sasanian Persia. He is the author of the well reviewed Dynastic Politics in the Age of Diocletian, AD 284-311 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), and has published article-length studies for a variety of journals and academic presses, including the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, the Journal of Late Antiquity, and Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. He is a member of the Serbo-Australian team that excavated a newly discovered Roman palace in Glac, Serbia, and a recipient of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies Early Career Award.
Byron has taught at the University of Sydney, Macquarie University and the University of New South Wales, and his contributions to teaching have been recognised through formal commendations and the Higher Education Academy (UK). He has also developed a profile in the world of popular history, writing popular web articles for Military History Now and documentaries for HistoryMarche and Eastern Roman History, including series on Aurelian and the Third Samnite War with over a million views.
Xavier Buxton
Post-doctoral researcher
Xavier Buxton is a scholar of archaic and classical Greek literature, whose research focuses on Athenian drama, ancient emotions, and early conceptions of the mind. His doctoral dissertation, completed at Oxford in 2023 under the supervision of Felix Budelmann, offers an interdisciplinary examination of ‘good fear’ in Aeschylean tragedy, set alongside the emotional discourse of Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as contemporary research on the emotions in philosophy, sociology and cognitive science. Xavier is now revising the dissertation for publication. He has also co-edited a volume on the imagination in ancient Greece, and has work forthcoming on pathos and the ‘mystic drama’ at Eleusis, choral panic across different dramatic genres, and kinesthetic spectatorship in the prologue of Sophocles’ Ajax.
Before coming to the University of Cyprus, Xavier taught Greek and Latin literature and languages at Warwick and at Oxford. He began his academic studies, however, as an English Literature student at Cambridge (2011, BA Hons, 1st Class). There he won the Richard Crashaw Scholarship and the Cambridge Quarterly Prize for his dissertation on Shelley’s negotiation of Sappho’s lyric voice. Awarded a Henry Fellowship, he then spent a year as a ‘Special Student’ at Yale, working on the H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) archive at the Beinecke Library, but finding himself increasingly drawn to the Greek poetry by which H.D. herself had been inspired. After a two-year stint as a schoolteacher in Bournemouth, and a year working for a free-expression NGO, Xavier returned to academia in 2016. His graduate studies at Oxford were funded by the Clarendon Fund and the Arts and Humanities Research Council; he has since held research positions at ENS Lyon and the Institute for Classical Studies.
As a late convert to the discipline of Classics, Xavier maintains a keen interest in the modern reception of ancient literature, especially the translation of archaic lyric and the adaptation of Greek drama for the stage and screen; as a former teacher, he is also enthusiastically committed to outreach work of all kinds. For three years, he coordinated the Warwick Ancient Drama Festival, bringing 500 students from 30 schools for a day of workshops centred on a matinee performance of a Greek play; he writes occasionally about Classical subjects for non-specialist publications (The Oxonian Review; Omnibus).
Styliani Constantinou
Research Assistant
Having developed an early strong interest in classical studies, Styliani Constantinou graduated from High School in 2022, and she is currently a second-year undergraduate student at the Department of Classics and Philosophy of the University of Cyprus. She received a scholarship from the Nikos K. Shiacolas Scholarship Foundation (in cooperation with the Municipality of Karavas), while her current studies are funded by the Cyprus State Scholarship Foundation. Her research interests include Ancient Greek Dialects, Lyric Poetry, Ancient Greek Drama, Greek Religion, and Mythology.
As a support staff member of the research program GROUPMINDS, her duties include analysis of bibliography, organisation of meetings, proofreading of texts, and general contribution to the support of the research work.
