Maria Boletsi is Associate Professor in Film and Literary Studies of Leiden University.

More information about Maria Boletsi

Curriculum vitae

Maria Boletsi is Associate Professor in Film and Literary Studies at LUCAS and (since 2018) Endowed Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam, where she holds the Marilena Laskaridis Chair. She received her Ph.D. with honors from Leiden University (Barbarism, Otherwise 2010) and holds cum laude degrees in Cultural Analysis (research MA, University of Amsterdam), Comparative Literature (BA, University of Amsterdam), and in Classics and Modern Greek Literature (BA, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki). Μaria has been research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS theme-group fellowship, 2022), DFG-Mercator fellow at Bonn University (2019), Stanley Seeger Research fellow at Princeton University (2016), visiting scholar at Geneva University (2016) and Columbia University (2008-2009), and a participant in the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory (2006). She is a member of the editorial / advisory boards of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, the Journal of Greek Media and Culture, and the book series Thamyris/Intersecting by Brill and Greek / Modern Intersections by University of Michigan Press. She is also Chair of the Advisory Board of the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (since 2019) and member of the Humanities Roundtable of the Dutch Research Council (NWO; since 2021), the Scientific Council of the Netherlands Institute in Athens (NIA, since 2024), and the International Scientific Committee of C.P. Cavafy Archive of the Onassis Foundation (since 2023). Since September 2024, she is elected external member of the Governing Council of the Hellenic Open University. At LUCAS, she was co-leader of the Modern & Contemporary Studies Research Cluster with Sara Polak from 2020 to 2023. She is currently program director of the Research MA Arts, Literature, and Media.

Maria’s research is situated in comparative literature, literary and cultural theory, conceptual history, Modern Greek literature and culture, and Anglophone literature. In her work, she tries to bring literature, art, and other forms of cultural expression to bear on urgent societal questions (post-9/11 processes of othering, debates on terrorism, intersecting crises, post-truth, the environmental crisis) and to situate the study of local cases in global debates and transnational frameworks. Her projects are usually structured around concepts (e.g., barbarism, crisis, futurity, spectrality, the weird), which serve as flexible methodological tools for interdisciplinary research. In her current research, she proposes the term ‘weird turn’ to study contemporary ‘spillovers’ of the genre of the weird in ecology, politics, science, scholarship and other domains (see “Weird Turn” below). Since 2014, part of her work has revolved around crisis rhetoric and alternative ‘grammars’ and imaginaries emerging from recent crisis-scapes, particularly in Greece, Europe, and the Mediterranean. In another long-term project, which started from her Ph.D. dissertation and evolved into a collaborative project (completed in 2023), she explored the workings of the figure of the barbarian in cultural theory, literature, culture, and public rhetoric in European modernity. The work of the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy has also been a constant reference point in her work since 2005. She recently completed a monograph on spectrality in Cavafy’s poetics and his poetry’s contemporary afterlives (Specters of Cavafy; 2024).

For her research projects and key publications, see below or visit her academia.edu page: https://leidenuniv.academia.edu/MariaBoletsi

Maria has been teaching at LUCAS since 2010, mainly in the BA Film- en Literatuurwetenschap (Film and Literary Studies), the MA Media Studies (track: Cultural Analysis: Literature and Theory) and the Research MA Arts, Literature and Media. Her courses cover a wide range of topics in modern and contemporary literature, culture, and politics, literary and cultural theory, and conceptual history. Most MA courses she has designed are research-based (e.g. Conceptual History as a Task for Comparative Literature: Barbarism; Literature, Art, and the Political after 9/11; Crisis, Literature, and the Contemporary). She is also supervising several Ph.D. candidates at the universities of Leiden, Amsterdam, and Oslo.

Fields and topics of interest

• Literary, cultural, and political theory
• Modern Greek literature and culture
• Anglophone literature
• Environmental Humanities
• History of Concepts
• Weird fiction
• Posthumanist theory
• Futurity, utopianism, future imaginaries
• Intersections of literature, art, and politics
• Crisis narratives

Research

a. The Weird Turn

In my current project, I propose the term weird turn to explore a 21^st-century turn to speculative fiction, non-positivist epistemologies, and representational modes that twist realism in response to interconnected crises and radical uncertainty about the future. The project studies this turn as a spillover of weird fiction in domains beyond literature - theory, philosophy, science, technoscience/AI, economy, politics, activism, education - against the backdrop of the environmental omnicrisis.

Although in the 20^th century the weird was mainly used for a marginalized fictional genre, the concept gained valence in the 21^st century owing to “New Weird” writers and the canonization of “Old Weird” writers like H.P. Lovecraft, and has recently veered towards several domains beyond literature (“weird science,” “global weirding,” “weird realism,” “weird utopianism,” “weird economies,” “weird geography” etc.). Rather than an escape to fantasy or a complete meshing of fiction and reality, the weird marks a particular entanglement of fiction and reality that also insists on their distinction. My hypothesis is that the weird, through its literary genealogy and current spillovers beyond literature, can help put forward a novel understanding of the role of fictionality in today’s crisis-ridden world. The project explores the emancipatory potential of the weird turn, as well as its controversial and pathological aspects (e.g., its ‘spillover’ in ecofascism and conspiracy cultures). By scrutinizing and theorizing the weird turn, I seek to develop the notion of weird humanism as a basis for a weird ethics in times of ecocide.

I am pursuing this project both individually and collaboratively. The project was initially sparked by the NIAS theme-group fellowship (2022) on the project “The Politics of (De)familiarization: The Common and the Strange in Contemporary Europe.” With. Florian Lippert and Dimitris Soudias, we are editing a special issue for Cultural Studies titled “New Normals, New Weirds” (forthcoming).

b. Grammars of Crisis and Alternative Imaginaries

Since 2014, I have been studying contemporary crisis rhetoric in different contexts, with an emphasis on the Greece and the Mediterranean. Proposing grammatical categories as conceptual tools, in this project I explore the normative operations of ‘grammars of crisis’ that impose restrictive diagnoses of the present, alongside the potential of grammatical categories for articulating alternative imaginaries. I am particularly interested in mobilizations of the middle voice in literature, street art, and protest cultures. As a grammatical category in which the subject remains inside the action, the middle voice has disappeared in modern languages, yet middle voice constructions are still functional in many languages. The middle voice has also been theorized as a mode that unsettles dualisms and creates indeterminacy between e.g., agency and patiency, subject and object. Can the middle voice offer alternatives to the dominant distinction between active and passive subjects in crisis-rhetoric? Can it articulate alternative conceptions of subjectivity, agency, and responsibility to those propagated by the neoliberal governmentality of crisis today?

I have been working on this project individually and collaboratively, through various research groups and networks, e.g., LUCAS network “Crisis and Critique”; ASCA research group “Crisis, Critique and Futurity”; OSL Research group “Crisis and Critique: Rethinking Europe and the Global South”; Cultural Analysis network “Greek Studies Now.” The project output includes several workshops, conferences, and events, 8 articles and chapters, and 2 co-edited volumes: From Crisis to Critique: Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes (Palgrave 2020) & (Un)timely Crises: Chronotopes and Critique  (Palgrave 2021) (see “Key publications”).

c. European History of Barbarism (completed)

In 2013, I received an NWO Internationalisation grant for the project “Barbarian: History of a Fundamental European Concept from the 18th Century to the Present” (2013-2016). This collaborative project focused on the modern European history of the ‘barbarian,’ particularly through its manifestations in literature. Responding to the contemporary popularity of the term ‘barbarism’ in Western public rhetoric, the project contributes to a critical and historically grounded understanding of this concept’s past and contemporary uses, and foregrounds its foundational role in modern European histories and identities.

The project sprang from a collaboration among scholars from Leiden University, the University of Geneva, Bonn University, Fribourg University, and (since 2017) Oxford University and the University of Amsterdam. The project’s first part was funded by the NWO (PI: Maria Boletsi) and the SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation; PI: Markus Winkler). The project was completed in 2023. Its main output is the 2-volume co-authored monograph Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature, and the Arts: Volume I focuses the 18th to the early 20th century (2018) and Volume II on the 20th and 21st centuries (2023).

Go here for more information.

d. Spectrality in Poetry (completed)

This project, which resulted in my new monograph Specters of Cavafy (University of Michigan Press, 2024), emerged from my long-term preoccupation with the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933), the best-known modern Greek poet and an important figure in modernism and world literature. Drawing from recent theorizations of the ‘specter’ as a conceptual metaphor in cultural theory, I develop spectrality as a theoretical and analytical lens for revisiting Cavafy’s poetry and its bearing on our present. The monograph brings together theories of spectrality, performativity, irony, and affect, in order to trace the workings of a) the spectral as a central metaphor in Cavafy’s idiosyncratic modernist poetics and b) his poetry’s ‘afterlives’ in contemporary settings: in the Western cultural and political imaginary since 1989 and in Greece today.

Key publications

Books

Monographs

• Maria Boletsi, Specters of Cavafy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024.

• Markus Winkler and Maria Boletsi, with Jens Herlth, Laura Lonsdale, Christian Moser et al. Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature and the Arts. Vol. 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2023.

• Markus Winkler, with Maria Boletsi, Jens Herlth, Christian Moser, Julian Reidy and Melanie Rohner. Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature and the Arts. Vol. 1: From the Enlightenment to the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2018.

Reviewed by: Leire Urricelqui, Arcadia 54 (2), 2019: 289–293.

• Maria Boletsi, Sarah de Mul, Isabel Hoving, and Liesbeth Minnaard. De lichtheid van literatuur: Engagement in de multiculturele samenleving [The Lightness of Literature: Engagement in the Multicultural Society]. Leuven: Acco, 2015.

Reviewed by: Sander Bax, Spiegel der Letteren 58 (3), 2016: 427-431.

• Barbarism and Its Discontents. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Reviewed by:

• Susan J. Jarratt in Comparative Literature Studies 52 (3), 2015.
• Lary May in Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 28/29, 2012/2013.

Edited volumes and encyclopedias

• Mixed Media and Public Art. Ed. by Maria Boletsi and Kristina Gedgaudaite. Section of The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Ed. by Ihab Saloul and Britt Baillie. Palgrave, 2024-ongoing.
• (Un)timely Crises: Chronotopes and Critique. Co-edited with Natashe Lemos-Dekker, Kasia Mika, Ksenia Robbe. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
• Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes: From Crisis to Critique. Co-edited with Janna Houwen and Liesbeth Minnaard. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Reviewed by:

         Francesca Zaccone, The Journal of Greek Media and Culture 8.1, 2022. 113-115.

• Subjects Barbarian, Monstrous, and Wild: Encounters in the Arts and Contemporary Politics. Co-edited with Tyler Sage. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018.
• Barbarism Revisited: New Perspectives on an Old Concept. Co-edited with Christian Moser. Leiden and Boston: Brill / Rodopi, 2015.
• Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Ways of Knowing in the Humanities. Co-edited with C. Birdsall, I. Sapir, and P. Verstraete. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009.

Special Journal issues

• Literature and Public World Making. Ed. by Maria Boletsi, Marc Farrant, Divya Nadkarni, and Marco de Waard. Parallax 30.1 (2024).
• Greece and the South: Grammas of Comparison, Protest, and Futurity. Ed.  by Maria Boletsi & Dimitris Papanikolaou. Journal of Greek Media and Culture. 8.2 (2022).
• Ruins in Contemporary Greek Literature, Art, Cinema, and Public Space. Edited by Maria Boletsi & Ipek A. Celik-Rappas. Journal of Modern Greek Studies. 38.2 (2020).

Key articles & book chapters 

• “The Politics of Weird Aesthetics: Fictionality in New Forms of Protest.” Parallax. 30.1 (2024). (open access) https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2024.2406070

• “Grammar and Its Political Affordances: The Resonance of the Middle Voice from the Greek Crisis Decade to ‘Post-Crisis’ Imaginaries.” In Memory and the Language of Contention. Ed. by Sophie van den Elzen and Ann Rigney. Leiden: Brill (in press, forthcoming 2024).

• “Weirding Europe: Fiction and Ghostliness as Grammars of Resistance in Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Europa, ‘Based on a True Story’ (2019).” In E(n)stranged: Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture. Ed. by Nilgun Bayraktar and Alberto Godioli. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan (in press; forthcoming 2024).

• “Literature and Public World-Making: Introduction.” Marco de Waard, Maria Boletsi, Marc Farrant, and Divya Nadkarni. Parallax. 30.1 (2024). (introduction to special issue)

• “Greece and the Global South: Gestures of Spatial Disobedience.” Maria Boletsi & Dimitris Papanikolaou. Journal of Greek Media and Culture. 8.2 (October 2022): 129-141. (introduction to special issue). https://doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00054_2

• “Introduction: From Crisis to Critique.” Co-authored with Janna Houwen and Liesbeth Minnaard. Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes: From Crisis to Critique. Ed. Maria Boletsi, Janna Houwen, and Liesbeth Minnaard. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 1-24. Open Acess: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_1

• “Rethinking Stasis and Utopianism: Empty Placards and Imaginative Boredom in the Greek Crisis-Scape.” Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes: From Crisis to Critique. Ed. Maria Boletsi, Janna Houwen, and Liesbeth Minnaard. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 267- 290. https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A3220777/download

• “Recasting the Indebted Subject in the Middle Voice.” Social Science Information. 58.3 (2019): 430-453. https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018419856776 (open access: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0539018419856776
• “Faith, Irony, Salt, and Possible Impossibilities: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus in Conversation with Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘From Mythology’.” Mehigan T., Moser C. (Eds.) The Intellectual Landscape in the Works of J.M. Coetzee. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018. 133-157.
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• “Crisis, Terrorism, and Post-Truth: Processes of Othering and Self-Definition in the Culturalization of Politics.” Subjects Barbarian, Monstrous, and Wild: Encounters in the Arts and Contemporary Politics. Ed. Maria Boletsi and Tyler Sage. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018. 17-50.

• “The Revenge of Fiction in New Languages of Protest: Holograms, Post-truth, and the Literary Uncanny.” Frame: Journal of Literary Studies 31.2 (2018): 13-34.

• “Europe and Its Discontents: Intra-European Violence in Dutch Literature after 9/11.” 9/11 in European Literature: Negotiating Identities Against the Attacks and What Followed. Ed. Svenja D. Frank. Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 283-322.

• “The Unbearable Lightness of Crisis: (Anti-)Utopia and Middle Voice in Sotiris Dimitriou’s Close to the Belly.” Greece in Crisis: Culture and the Politics of Austerity. Ed. Dimitris Tziovas. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017. 256-81.

• “From the Subject of the Crisis to the Subject in Crisis: Middle Voice on Greek Walls.” Journal of Greek Media and Culture. 2.1 (2016). 3-28.

This article was translated in Greek and German and included in 3 languages in:

The Documenta 14 Reader. Ed. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk. Prestel / Random House, 2017. 431-68.

• “Still Waiting for Barbarians after 9/11? Cavafy’s Reluctant Irony and the Language of the Future.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32.1 (2014): 55-80. 10.1353/mgs.2014.0018

• “Barbarian Encounters: Rethinking Barbarism in C.P. Cavafy’s and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.” Comparative Literature Studies 44. 1-2 (2007): 67-96. 

• “How to Do Things with Poems: Performativity in the Poetry of C.P. Cavafy.” Arcadia: International Journal of Literary Studies 41. 2 (2006): 396-418. 

Publications

Activities