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Personnel and Faculty

Faculty, 2002-2010

Roderick Beaton
David Bellamy
Hugh Bennison
Vicki Bennison
Joseph Boone
Brewster Chamberlin
Gerald Dawe
Lee Durrell
Terry Eagleton
Nicholas Gage
James Gifford
Anthony Hirst
Aaron Jaffe
Isabelle Keller
Sukrita Paul Kumar
Sea Latham
Anna Lillios
Michael Llewellyn-Smith
Peter Mackridge
Ian MacNiven
Maria Misra
Jan Morris
Mark Morris
James R. Nichols
Eve Patten
Richard Pine
Emilie Pine
James Potts
Beatrice Skordili
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Harish Trivedi

Faculty (Visiting Faculty & Returning Faculty)

Faculty participate in a variety of keynote lectures, tutorials, and/or seminars. For seminars, faculty foster discussion amongst the panelists presenting papers, leading to increased scholarly interaction and development. In tutorials, faculty guide students through materials in conjunction with other events in the School. Since 2004, the DSC has focused on seminars involving scholars from a variety of backgrounds, in which faculty promote greater interaction and development of a core discussion than is typically possible in traditional academic conferences. eastern europe map

Visiting Faculty & Guest Writers:

Roderick Beaton - Dr. Beaton is Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London. He is the authors of several books, most notably George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel and The Medieval Greek Romance, and his edited volumes include The Greek Novel, A.D. 1 - 1985 and Digenes Akrites: New Approaches to Byzantine Heroic Poetry. He is also an accomplished translator.

Hugh Bennison - The late Hugh Bennison, who died in March 2010, was a part-time resident of Corfu, an early pioneer who fell in love with the beauty and flora of the island and bought a house here some thirty years ago. Hugh studied horticulture and then tropical agriculture at Cambridge University. He had a career in international rural development and poverty alleviation. He started in the Kenyan Colonial Agricultural Service; stints in Botswana and Brussels followed; and his final post before retirement was in Thailand where he was the EU diplomat in charge of EU aid to South and South East Asia. Most recently he had been involved in a commercial peony project and had travelled extensively throughout the world studying and collecting specimens.

Joseph Boone - Dr. Boone is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. A specialist in the novel as genre, gender and queer theory, and modernism, he is the author of Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction and Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. Recipient of ACLS, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Huntington Library Fellowships, among others, Boone has co-edited two collections, Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism and Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations. He has also written a dramatic musical, with his composer-brother Benjamin, based on Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man, and he is currently working on a project titled The Homoerotics of Orientalism.

Terry Eagleton - Dr. Eagleton has recently relocated from Oxford to the University of Manchester, where he is professor of Cultural Theory and the John Rylands Fellow. An internationally respected scholar in critical theory, he has also done major work in literature from the 19th and 20th centuries. His other interests include English-language literature and culture of Ireland, on which he has recently completed a trilogy of works. His keynote lecture in 2004 was based on his recent book on tragedy, Sweet Violence.

Shere Hite - Dr. Hite is an American born cultural historian, sex educator and feminist, an expert on psycho-sexual behaviour and gender relations. Her sexological work has focused primarily on female sexuality. Her books include The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality, Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress, Sexual Honesty, by Women, for Women, and Oedipus Revisited. Her forthcoming books include Women Loving Women and Questions.

Aaron Jaffe - is an Assistant Professor of Modernism and Cultural Theory at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. He is the author of Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, and his work on Modernism has appeared in such journals as symploke and Modernism/modernity.

Sukrita Paul Kumar - is a poet and critic, teaching literature at the University of Delhi, and a former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. She has published four volume of poems in English and her critical works include Narrating Partition, Conversations on Modernism and Man, Woman and Androgyny. She has co-edited Women's Studies in India: Contours of Change and has held many visiting fellowships and lectureships at such institutions as Cambridge University, SOAS in London and the University of Iowa.

Sean Latham - Dr. Latham is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Faculty of English at the University of Tulsa. His books include "Am I a Snob?": Modernism and the Novel, Joyce's Modernism, and James Joyce: Visions and Revisions.

Michael Llewellyn-Smith - Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith, DPhil, CMG, KCVO, is a member of the Council of the British School at Athens, the Anglo-Hellenic League, the Franco-British Council, the University of London, and the Cathedral Fabric Commission for England. He is a visiting Professor at Kings College London and has been a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University, a Foreign Fellow of the Onassis Foundation, and Visiting Fellow of the British School at Athens. He has written several books on Modern Greek, most notably Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor 1919-1922 and Athens: A Cultural and Literary History.

Peter Mackridge - is Professor Emeritus in the University of Oxford and recent recipient of an honorary doctorate from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and is widely recognized as an authority on medieval and modern Greek language and literature, including the Ionian (and National) poet Dionysios Solomos. Professor Mackridge�s books include The Modern Greek Language (1985) and Dionysios Solomos (1989). He is co-author of Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language (1997). All these books have also been published in Greek; a collection of his essays on Greek poets Εκμάγεια της ποίησης appeared in 2008; and Peter Mackridge contributes regularly to Greek as well as anglophone academic literary journals. He has edited Greek editions of works by Kosmas Politis: Eroica (1982) and Στου Χατζηφράγκου (1988); and edited both the Greek text and the English translations in The Free Besieged and Other Poems by Dionysios Solomos (2000). His most recent book Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 was published in April 2009.  

Maria Misra - Dr. Misra is Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford University and a Fellow of Keble College. Her books include Vishnu's Crowded Temple: India since the Great Rebellion and Business, Race and Politics in British India c.1860-1960. She presented a three-part TV documentary on eighteenth and nineteenth century India, 'An India Affair' in 2001 and has written articles on Indian culture and poltiics for the Guardian and New Statesman.

Jan Morris - Jan Morris, CBC, is a world-renowned writer, journalist, historian, essayist, travel-writer and novelist, is the author of over forty books, many of them classics, including Venice, Oxford, The Pax Britannica Trilogy, The Venetian Empire, Journeys, Hong Kong, Sydney, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Conundrum.

Mark Morris - Dr. Mark Morris is the Visiting Scholar-in-Residence at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, Canada, and is a writer, photographer, award-winning librettist, and broadcaster. He teaches creative non-fiction, including travel writing, concentrating on helping young writers emerge. He has written widely for magazines and newspapers in many genres, and his operas have been performed in eight countries and in four languages. His first book, Domesday Revisited, was an historical travel book, and his second, the Pimlico Dictionary of 20th-Centry Composers, a huge survey of 20th-Century classical music.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - Dr. Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. An esteemed scholar, translator, and educator, she has been a Kent fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. Among her Distinguished Faculty Fellowships is the Tagore Fellowship at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (India). Her book Don't Call me Postcolonial: From Kant to Kawakubo was published by Harvard in 1998. Her other publications include In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1988) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), and her seminal essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" She also publishes and lectures in her native Bengali.

Harish Trivedi - Dr. Trivedi is a Professor of English at the University of Delhi, where he is also Head of the Department of English. He has spoken widely as a visiting scholar at such schools as the University of London, George Washington University, l'Université de Montréal, University of Leiden, and Oxford. He is the author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India as well as many article on English Literature, Indian Literature, and Postcolonialism. He has also edited Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990, Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, and Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory, Text and Context.


Returning Faculty

David Bellamy OBE - originally trained as a botanist at Durham University, where he later held the post of Senior Lecturer in Botany until 1982, and still holds the post of Honorary Professor for Adult and Continuing Education. The word Botany is from the Greek βοτανη, which means "pasture, grass, fodder", perhaps via the idea of a livestock keeper needing to know which plants are safe for livestock to eat. Botany, the study of plants, began with tribal efforts to identify edible, medicinal and poisonous plants, making botany one of the oldest sciences. From this ancient interest in plants, the scope of botany has increased. David Bellamy, is a honorary patron of the Durrell School and a frequent visitor to Corfu, will give his usual exuberant walks in Gerald Durrell's footsteps, hi-lighting appreciation and changes in The Garden of the Gods.

Brewster Chamberlin - Dr. Chamberlin's research and teaching interests have concentrated on European history in the 19th and 20th centuries. He has taught at the University of Maryland, the Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies, and at the Technical University in Berlin. The editor and author of numerous articles and books on German and European history, he also served in senior positions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. His books Paris Now and Then and Mediterranean Sketches were published in 2002 and 2005 respectively.

Gerald Dawe - Mr. Dawe has published six collections of poetry, most recently The Morning Train (1999) and Lake Geneva (2003). He has also published two collections of essays and a critical memoir. He is a lecturer in English and director of the graduate creative writing programme at Trinity College Dublin. He is working on The Proper Word, collected essays on poetry and politics in Ireland.

James Gifford - (alpha.fdu.edu/~jgifford) Dr. Gifford is an Assistant Professor and Director of the University Core at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His academic research generally includes reader response, colonial literature, Humanities Computing, and twentieth century literature (American and British). James has published extensively on Lawrence Durrell and is currently editing the Robert Graves / Aemelia Laracuen correspondence as well as the poetry and travel writing of the 19th century Canadian author Edward Taylor Fletcher. His edition of the Henry Miller - Herbert Read Letters was released in 2007 and his critical editions of Lawrence Durrell's first novels, Pied Piper of Lovers and Panic Spring were released in 2008.

Anthony Hirst - until recently Lecturer in Modern Greek (and now honorary research fellow) in the Institute of Byzantine Studies, Queen's University Belfast, is a member of the Board of the Durrell School. Dr Hirst has published God and the Poetic Ego (2004), a critical study of the religious elements in the poetry of Palamas, Sikelianos and Elytis, and has restored Cavafy�s Greek text (to conform to the author's own printings) for the Oxford World�s Classics dual-language edition of The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy (2007), a volume to which Peter Mackridge contributed a long introductory essay. Apart from his work on Angelos Sikelianos (from Lefkada), Dr Hirst has done as yet unpublished research on two other Ionian poets, Dionysios Solomos and Andreas Kalvos. spanish dog names

Isabelle Keller - has been teaching English literature, linguistics and translation for the past three years at the University of Toulouse le Mirail, France. Her work on anamorphosis in The Alexandria Quartet, for a preliminary dissertation, was awarded the International Lawrence Durrell Prize for New Scholarship in 2000. The study of anamorphosis has also led her to work on intertextuality, relating Durrell's writing to the visual arts.

Anna Lillios - Dr. Lillios is an associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida. She served as past president of the International Lawrence Durrell Society and is the editor of its web site. Her edited volume of essays, Lawrence Durrell and the Greek World, was published by Associated University Presses in 2004.

Ian S. MacNiven - Dr. MacNiven is the author of the authorized biography on Lawrence Durrell and is the editor of a number of other volumes, including The Durrell-Miller Letters, 1935-80 and The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon. He is a Professor Emeritus of the SUNY Maritime College and is currently working on a biography of James Laughlin.

Raymond C. Marchionni - Raymond Carmine Marchionni, D.M.A., is Professor of Music in the Department of Music at The University of Toledo. Prior to arriving at Toledo in 2001, he held positions at various universities throughout the country. His posts have included Professor and Chair of the Department of Music at Indiana-Purdue University at Fort Wayne (1997-2001) and Georgia Southern University (1981-1997), Chair of the Division of Fine Arts and Director of the Alexander Center for the Performing Arts at Concord College in West Virginia (1977-81), Assistant Professor of Piano at Coker College in South Carolina (1973-77), Instructor of Piano at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro (1968-1970) and at Denver University in Colorado (1965-1968). He received his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Piano Performance at The University of Michigan, and the Doctor of Musical Arts degree at North Texas State University. He took advanced piano study with Daniel Ericourt, artist-in-residence at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, concentrating on the music of Debussy and Ravel. His professional activities have included numerous solo piano recitals, performances for national public radio and television, piano accompanist, chamber music player, and conductor of master classes and workshops in piano.

James R. Nichols - Dr. Nichols is Professor of English Literature Emeritus and Past Chair of the English and Philosophy Department at Georgia Southern University. He presently serves as the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Durrell School of Corfu. Dr. Nichols has published widely on the fiction of Lawrence Durrell and co-edited a book on Durrell's humour. He has written a novel, Children of the Sea, as well as a volume on the Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson. He is currently working on a study of the fictional women of Lawrence Durrell.

Eve Patten - Dr. Patten has been a lecturer in English at Trinity College, Dublin since 1996, before which she was a British Council lecturer at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She has published work on various nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish writers, and is co-author of A Glossary of Irish Studies (Edward Arnold, 2003). In 2008 she co-edited Literatures of War, the proceedings of the 2007 conference of the Lawrence Durrell School/Durrell School of Corfu, and her monograph Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning Fictions of War will be published by Cork University Press in 2013 play opap online .

Emilie Pine - Dr. Pine completed her Ph.D. at Trinity College, Dublin, in 2004, and then  lectured for two years at the University of York. She joined the School of English, Drama and Film at UNiversity College Dublin in the spring of 2008. Her main research interests are in the interdisciplinary study of modern Irish culture, with a specific focus on memory studies, theatre and film. Her book, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture is published by Palgrave Macmillan. Emilie is currently writing a cultural history of Ireland in the 1930s and was the Irish Fulbright Scholar to UC Berkeley for 2010.

Richard Pine - www.durrell-school-corfu.org/pine.htm Academic Director. Richard Pine, who founded the Durrell School of Corfu in 2001-2, is the author of the definitive critical work on Lawrence Durrell, Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape (revised second edition 2005). In the 1970s and 80s he was a consultant to the Council of Europe on cultural development programmes. He is a former Secretary of the Irish Writers' Union and Chairman of the Media Association of Ireland, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He has also written the definitive study of the playwright Brian Friel, and lectures widely at universities and research institutes in the USA and Europe, including Berkeley, Emory, NYU, UCLA, and the Princess Grace Library Monaco.

Jim Potts - Jim Potts worked for the British Council for 35 years, in Ethiopia, Kenya, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Sweden and Australia. He was also Director of the British Council in Czechoslovakia, Australia and Sweden; Regional Director, Northern Greece and Head of East and Central Europe Department in London. He began his international career as a teacher on Corfu; he studied English Literature, Film-Making/Drama and Education at the universities of Oxford, Bristol and London, respectively. His films include a documentary on traditional Ethiopian art and another on the Greek-American playwright, Demetrius Toteras.

Beatrice Skordili - Dr. Skordili teaches English Literature and Composition at New York College, Athens, Greece and completed a dissertation on the Alexandria Quartet and Narrative Theory via a study of topological tropes (Syracuse University, USA). She has presented and published on Post-Structuralist Theory, Cinema, and Lawrence Durrell. Though arising from a French psychoanalytic focus, her work attempts a syncretist theoretical approach combined with close genealogical readings of texts

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