Stavroula Constantinou

Project Coordinator


Director of the Centre for Medieval Arts & Rituals (CeMAR),
Associate Professor in Byzantine Studies
Dept. of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies,
University of Cyprus

Stavroula Constantinou is the founder and director of the Centre for Medieval Arts & Rituals (CeMAR). She is an Associate Professor in Byzantine Studies at the UCY and member of the European Cultural Parliament. She studied at the University of Cyprus (1992-1996), the Free University of Berlin (1997-1999, 2000-2003), and the University of Cambridge (1999-2000). During 2010-2011 she was a Humboldt fellow at the Free University of Berlin. Currently she coordinates three major research projects: the European twinning project Network for Medieval Arts and Rituals (https://netmar.cy) and two projects funded through the Cyprus Foundation of Research and Innovation, Lactating Breasts: Motherhood and Breastfeeding in Antiquity and Byzantium and Storyworlds in Collections: Toward a Theory of the Ancient and Byzantine Tale. Her research focuses on Byzantine Greek narratives (mainly hagiography and romance), gender, ritual, performance, and emotions. Concerning gender in particular, she has published on the following: gendered emotions, female and male sainthood, Byzantine ideologies concerning women, literary portraits of women, and the female body.

Andria Andreou

Postdoctoral Researcher


Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Medieval Arts & Rituals (CeMAR) of the University of Cyprus,
Dept. of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, University of Cyprus

Andria Andreou is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cyprus. She obtained a BA (Byzantine and Modern Greek) and an MA (Byzantine Studies) from the University of Cyprus, before completing her MPhil in European Literature and Culture at Cambridge University. She is currently finishing an MBA at the Cyprus Institute of Marketing. Her PhD thesis, The Holy Double: Identity, Desire and Holiness in Byzantine Passions and Lives of Couplesapplies concepts drawn from psychoanalysis, performance and gender studies to explore the relationship between identity, desire and holiness in Lives and Passions of saintly couples. She has taught subjects related to Byzantine literature as a Special Scientist at the University of Cyprus. She has also worked as a Special Scientistat Vladimiros Kaukarides Drama School in the fields of Modern Greek and World Literature. She was awarded scholarships by the Cyprus Institute of Marketing (2018-2020), the University of Cyprus (2015-2016) and the Haute École en Sciences Sociales (2010). Her research focuses on gender, performance, the body, death, desire, dreams and emotions in Byzantine literature.

Christian Høgel

Advisory Board


Professor in Classics and Byzantine Studies
Dept. of History, University of Southern Denmark

Christian Høgel is a Professor at the Centre of Medieval Literature & Classical Studies, University of Southern Denmark, since 2014 and a guest Professor at the section of Greek Studies, University of Uppsala. He obtained an MA in Classics from the University of Copenhagen (1992) and a PhD from the University of Bergen, Norway (2000). He is also the co-director of the eight-year joint research project Retracing Connections(University of Uppsala and University of Southern Denmark)(funded by the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) and the co-director oftheCentre for Medieval Literature (a ten-year project of the University of York and the University of Southern Denmark under the Danish Research Foundation). He is the author of numerous articles and books, focusing among others on Byzantine hagiography and historiography, and mainly dealing with aspects of rewriting, style, the relationship between Byzantine theology and the Qur’an, and the concept of world literature and fiction.

Ingela Nilsson

Advisory Board


Professor in Greek Studies
Dept. of Linguistics and Philology,
Uppsala University

Ingela Nilsson is a Professor of Greek, specializing in Byzantine Greek, at Uppsala University since 2010, and the Director of the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (2019-2021). She studied at Göteborg University (BA, PhD), while she held the positions of Doctorate Fellow (Göteborg University), Assistant Professor and Associate Professor (Uppsala University), and Adjunct Professor (University of Oslo). She received numerous fellowships at the University of Cyprus (1996-1997, 2000), Bergen University (1999), Freie Universität Berlin (2002-2003, 2003-2004), the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (2006-2010) and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (2008-2009, 2017), and the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna (2014, 2017). Currently, she is the President of the Swedish Committee for Byzantine Studies and Swedish representative in the Association International des Études Byzantines (AIEB), Editor of Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia (2010-)and Editor of Byzantine Studies for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (Birmingham) (2020-22). Her research tackles aspects of genre, poetics, narrative techniques and structure, the time-space concept, imitation and transformation in Byzantine literature and especially in the romance, the satire, historiography and katabaseis.

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