Dr Tania Demetriou, Sidney Sussex
td227@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I am Lecturer in Drama at the Faculty and Fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College. I read English at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge and did my PhD also at Cambridge, at Trinity College; I then went to Oxford where I held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College. Before joining the Cambridge Faculty in 2016, I was Lecturer in early modern literature at the University of York.
My research focusses on classical reception in the early modern period, especially on the reception of Greek literature in England via European intermediaries and on the interaction between the practices of reading, scholarship, translation, and literary imitation in this period.
I am currently working on a book on the reception of Homer in England, which traces the impact on English literary culture of the early modern rediscovery of Homer’s epics. It explores how the reading of these works was shaped by their prior receptions on the continent which left their imprint on editorial practices, lexicography, philology, and translation, but also by their reception at particular historical moments among particular circles of English writers and thinkers, including the world of the commercial dramatists. George Chapman is a recurring focus of the book, alongside figures including Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Robert Greene, Thomas Watson, Spenser, and Mary Queen of Scots.
Together with Andrew Taylor, I convene the Neo-Latin seminar in the Faculty.
Research Interests
Classical reception; history of reading; translation; interactions between early modern English writing and the continent; Neo-Latin writing; early modern drama.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
I would be glad to work with graduate students in any of the above areas.
Selected Publications
‘How Gabriel Harvey read tragedy’, Renaissance Studies, advance online publication 2021.
Co-edited with Janice Valls-Russell, Thomas Heywood and the Classical Tradition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).
‘Compendious Poetry: Homer and Ausonius in Thomas Heywood’s Gynaikeion, or Various History Concerning Women’, in Thomas Heywood and the Classical Tradition, ed. Tania Demetriou and Janice Valls-Russell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), pp. 182-206.
‘The Non-Ovidian Elizabethan Epyllion: Thomas Watson, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield’, in Mythological Interweavings in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, ed Janice Valls-Russell, Charlotte Coffin, and Agnès Lafont (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 41-64.
Co-edited with Tanya Pollard, Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatres = Classical Receptions Journal 9:1 (2017).
Co-written with Tanya Pollard, ‘Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatres: An Introduction’, in Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatres, ed. Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard, special issue of Classical Receptions Journal 9:1 (2017), 1-35, open access as ‘Editor’s Choice’
Co-edited with Tanya Pollard, Milton, Drama, and Greek Texts = Seventeenth Century Journal 31:2 (2016), reprinted as Milton, Drama, and Greek Texts (London: Routledge, 2018).
‘The Homeric Question in the Sixteenth Century: Early Modern Scholarship and the Text of Homer’, Renaissance Quarterly, 68 (2015), 496-557.
Co-edited with Rowan Tomlinson, The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500-1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), re-issued in paperback in 2017.
‘Periphrōn Penelope and her Early Modern Translations', in The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500-1660, ed. Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 86-111.
‘Chapman’s Odysses (1614-1615): Translation and Allegory’ in Homère à la Renaissance: le mythe et ses transfigurations, ed. Luisa Capodieci and Philip Ford (Rome: Académie de France à Rome / Paris: Somogy, 2011), pp. 245-60.
‘“Essentially Circe”: Spenser, Homer and the Homeric Tradition’, Translation and Literature, 15 (2006), 151-76.
Translation of Latin and Greek paratexts in The Paratext in English Printed Drama to 1642, eds Sonia Massai and Thomas L. Berger, 2 vols (Cambridge: CUP, 2014).
