Dr. Tania Demetriou
Biography
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 2017, 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.
My current focus is a book that offers a fresh accoount of George Chapman's famous translations of Homer by reevaluating his career as a poet, classicist, and dramatist over the two-and-a-half decades when he was working on them. Insisting on Chapman's rootedness in the theatrical community within which he worked, this reappraisal reveals the significance of Homer to that community, enabing new readings of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.
Together with Andrew Taylor and Jacob Currie, 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; classical receptions and early modern sexualities; the work of George Chapman.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
I would be glad to work with graduate students in any of the above areas.
Connect with Tania
Publications
'George Chapman's "Old Lesson in Philosophy": A New Source for Ovid's Banquet of Sense', Review of English Studies, advance publication 2026.
‘The Poetics of Unpersuasion: Barnfield, Virgil, Shakespeare’, in Richard Barnfield’s Poetics: Early Modern English Poetry Beyond Shakespeare, ed. Fabio Ciambella, Cristiano Ragni, and Camilla Caporicci (London: Bloomsbury, 2025), pp. 133-62.
Co-edited with Silvia Bigliazzi, What is a Greek Source on the Early English Stage? Fifteen New Essays (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2024).
‘How Gabriel Harvey read tragedy’, Renaissance Studies, 35 (2021), 757-87.
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).