
Nominated Fellow, June 2019
Theodora holds a BA in Greek Philology from the University of Athens Greece (major: Classics) and an MA and PhD in Classics from University College London. After the completion of her doctorate, she held fellowships at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and at LMU Munich in Germany, and taught at University College London, at the Open University of Cyprus, and at Middlesex University London as visiting lecturer for Modern Greek. She was also a Margo Tytus summer fellow at the University of Cincinnati Ohio USA, a visiting scholar at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC and at UC Berkeley, and is also a fellow of the Advanced Seminar in the Humanities at Venice International University (VIU) and of the Fondation Hardt in Geneva, Switzerland. She is currently WIRL Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND fellow in Classics at the University of Warwick working on her post-doctoral project Plato on Lyric: The View from the Fourth Century.
Her research stay at the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh is part of a secondment within the framework of her COFUND fellowship, and is financially supported by the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick.
Theodora is currently researching the re-appropriation of lyric genres in Plato’s ideal city in the Laws Magnesia and looks at how this lyric re-appropriation and the re-establishment of choral performances are associated with Plato’s attempt to control human emotions. During her time at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh she will explore the uniting function of chorality in Plato’s Laws and also the possibility that the communal choral performances that are established in Magnesia might be threatened by the emotion of envy (phthonos). Envy in choral lyric and especially in Pindar’s victory odes is presented as an emotion that is threatening to the coherence of the performing chorus and to the community the chorus represents. For Plato envy could become a threat to the very core of the community in the Laws’ ideal city, and I will explore this possibility by drawing attention to how envy is perceived both in Plato’s view of the soul and in his envisioned ideal community.