Nikolas P. Kakkoufa
Senior Lecturer, Modern Greek
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Classics, Ancient Studies, and the Program in Hellenic Studies
(212) 854-9232
nk2776@columbia.edu
617A Hamilton Hall
Spring 2025 Office hours: TBA
Research Interests
Queer Theory
Gender and Sexuality (esp. bodies)
Reception Studies
Modern Greek and Cypriot Literature (and their diasporas)
Comparative Literature
Translation in Second Language Acquisition
Research languages: Modern Greek, English, French, Ancient Greek, Latin
Nikolas P. Kakkoufa (Ph.D. King’s College London) is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Greek, the Director of Undergraduate Studies for Classics, Ancient Studies, and Hellenic Studies, and the Director of the Greek, Latin, and Modern Greek Language Programs. Before his appointment at Columbia, he taught at Princeton University and the University of Cyprus. He is co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar in Modern Greek and is also affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
During 2020–2021, he was a Marilena Laskaridis Visiting Research Fellow in Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam. During the academic year 2024-2025, he will be a Lewis Gibson Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies and Visiting Faculty at Reid Hall in Paris (jointly supported by the Columbia Global Paris Center and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination).
His book in progress traces the history of an understudied tradition in Modern Greek Literature and History. Titled A Queer History of Modern Greek Writing (1821–2021), it combines cultural and literary history as well as queer theory and reception theory to tell a different story of the birth and evolution of the Greek nation. Through a comparative reading of the work of a range of writers the book examines key elements of the modern nation—race, religion, and family—and traces not only continuities within the history of queer writing in Greece, Cyprus, and their diasporas but also ruptures with the dominant exclusionary narrative(s) of Greekness.
Other forthcoming publications focus on the Queer Mediterranean. These include an article titled ‘Can the Queer Mediterranean Speak Back’ that offers a reading of queerness within the family in the Eastern Mediterranean through the lens of tenderness, and a chapter on ‘Bodies’ forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Mediterranean, among others.
At Columbia, he teaches elementary and advanced Modern Greek classes and interdisciplinary seminars on Queer Bodies (from Antiquity to Futurity), Mental Health in Literature (from Antiquity to the Present), the poetics of desire of C. P. Cavafy, the Queer Mediterranean, the Greek Revolution and its Legacies, and Greece at the Crossroads of Disciplines. He is also Co-Director of the study abroad seminar Mediterranean Humanities in Athens.
During his time at Columbia, he has held several administrative leadership positions and has served on the Lecturer Advisory Committee (2020-2022) and on the Columbia University Senate (2021-2023).
In 2021, he was awarded a Provost Large-Scale Teaching and Learning Grant for the project Learning Greek from the Streets: An Urban e-Archaeology of the City.
Selected Publications
‘So skillfully mirrored in his art’: mirroring desire in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. In: L. Diamantopoulou and M. Yerolemou, eds. 2019. Mirrors and Mirroring: From Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, pp. 93–103.
‘Dangerous dreams and dubious visions in Kornaros’ Erotokritos’. In L. Giannakopoulou and K.E. Skordyles, eds., 2017. Culture and Society in Crete: From Kornaros to Kazantzakis, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 33–66.
‘Σατιρικά Γυμνάσματα: μια ιδιάζουσα εφαρμογή της ‘ποιητικής’ μεθόδου της ονοματοχρησίας’. In: Η ποίηση και η ποιητική του Κωστή Παλαμά: εβδομήντα χρόνια από το θάνατό του. Τόμος Α, 2016. Athens: Palamas Foundation, pp. 367–390.
Κάνοντας ‘βήματα πίσω’. Η Παραλογή του Μιχάλη Γκανά και το δημοτικό τραγούδι. In: A. Polimerou-Kamalaki, ed., 2013. Λαϊκός Πολιτισμός και έντεχνος λόγος (Ποίηση - Πεζογραφία - Θέατρο). Πρακτικά Διεθνούς Επιστημονικού Συνεδρίου, 8-10 Δεκεμβρίου 2010. Volume A. Athens: Athens Academy, pp. 471-482.
