"Mary Shelley’s Greece: Rethinking Hellenism and Philhellenism"

SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies

Join us on Friday, September 18th for the first talk in our 2026 Fall Speaker Series!

W.A.C. Bennett Library, SFU Burnaby

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University is pleased to present <a href="https://www.enl.auth.gr/instructor_en.asp?Id=68" title="https://www.enl.auth.gr/instructor_en.asp?Id=68" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Dr. Maria Schoina</a>, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece!Join us Friday, September 18th at 2:30pm in person at the Bennett Library, SFU Burnaby, Room 7200, or online (<a href="https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89084516030" title="https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89084516030" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89084516030</a>), for her talk “Mary Shelley’s Greece: Rethinking Hellenism and Philhellenism”. This talk will be moderated by <a href="https://www.sfu.ca/hellenic-studies/humans/people/d-krallis.html" title="https://www.sfu.ca/hellenic-studies/humans/people/d-krallis.html" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Dr. Dimitris Krallis</a>, Professor, Department of Global Humanities.Attendance is free. The event is open to the public and will be recorded.This programming is made possible thanks to the generous support of the <a href="https://trk2.cp20.com/click/ds9u-30aiqm-3bgbbp-cocw1z88/" title="https://trk2.cp20.com/click/ds9u-30aiqm-3bgbbp-cocw1z88/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Stavros Niarchos Foundation</a> (SNF).

AbstractIn this presentation, I will examine Mary Shelley’s conceptualization and fictionalization of Greece, analyzing how her engagement with classical Greece and her sustained interest in the Greek War of Independence contributed to a distinctive form of philhellenic discourse. This discourse influenced the themes and motifs of her works, ranging from her most explicitly philhellenic novel, The Last Man (1826), to her last long work of fiction, Falkner (1837). Drawing upon archival materials, I argue that Mary Shelley’s nuanced reinterpretations of both ancient and modern Greece illuminate significant aspects of her literary, political, and gender sensibilities while also revealing an alternative tradition of Hellenism and Philhellenism that merits further exploration.

Speaker Biography<a href="https://www.enl.auth.gr/instructor_en.asp?Id=68" title="https://www.enl.auth.gr/instructor_en.asp?Id=68" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Maria Schoina</a> is Associate Professor of English Literature in the School of English of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her publications include Romantic “Anglo-Italians”: Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the Pisan Circle (Ashgate 2009; Routledge 2019), essays on Mary Shelley’s Greek studies in The Keats-Shelley Review (2019) and Notes &amp; Queries (2020), essays on Byron in The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron (2024) and in Studies in Romanticism (64.3.2025, on the Greek contexts of Don Juan). She has co-edited with Alexander Grammatikos the collection Byron and Translation (Liverpool University Press, 2024). Schoina is Joint President of the International Association of Byron Societies. In support of her research on Mary Shelley she received in 2024-25 a Carr-Thomas-Ovenden Fellowship in English Literature at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

"Mary Shelley’s Greece: Rethinking Hellenism and Philhellenism"

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"Mary Shelley’s Greece: Rethinking Hellenism and Philhellenism"

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