Dr Gonda Van Steen is Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, King’s College London. She is also Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies. She earned a BA and MA degree in Classics in Belgium and a PhD degree in Classics and Hellenic Studies from Princeton University. Her research and teaching interests include Greek language and literature through Byzantine and Modern Greek, Western travelers to Greece and the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth and twentieth-century receptions of the classics and especially of ancient theatre, and modern Greek intellectual and social history.
Van Steen holds the position of Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature in KCL’s Centre for Hellenic Studies and Department of Classics. Formerly, as the Cassas Chair in Greek Studies at the University of Florida, she taught courses in ancient and modern Greek language and literature and served as president and subsequently as executive director of the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA, www.mgsa.org).
Van Steen is the author of four books: Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece (2000); Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire (2010); Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands (2011); and Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967-1974 (2015).