Professor Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History, Oxford University
Dr Dionysis Kapsalis, Director of the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece
Professor Judith Mossman, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Arts and Humanities, Coventry University
Prof Naoíse Mac Sweeney, Professor of Classical Archaeology, University of Vienna
Dr Sofka Zinovieff, Writer
Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University. Since 2000, he has been Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College Oxford. He is Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research.
He works on the history of trade, religion, ideas and culture across Europe and Asia, with a particular focus on the Byzantine empire and on the Silk Roads of then past, present and future. His translation of the The Alexiad by Anna Komnene was published by Penguin Classics in 2009.
His most recent book, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World has been described as ‘magnificent’ (Sunday Times) ‘ dazzling’ (Guardian), ‘a rare book that makes you question your assumptions about the world’ (Wall St Journal) and ‘not just the most important history book in years, but the most important in decades’ (Berliner Zeitung).
Dionysis Kapsalis studied classical and English literature at Georgetown University in Washington. D.C. (1970-1974) and Modern Greek literature at King’s College, London (1981-1984), where he also taught for two years. From 1986 to 1997 he worked as an editor for Estia Publications. He has been working for the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation since 1998, occupying the position of director since 1999. He has published eighteen books on poetry, six volumes of essays and various translations of poetry (a selection of sonnets by Shakespeare, poems by Emily Dickinson, haiku by Issa and Basho, etc.) He has translated Beckett’s Happy Days for the state as well as Shakespeare’s plays Romeo and Juliet, Othello and King Lear.
Judith Mossman read Greats at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church. Her research interests lie in Greek tragedy (especially Euripides) and Greek literature under the Roman Empire (especially Plutarch and Lucian). She became a Senior Lecturer and Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin before returning to the UK as Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham. She is now Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Arts and Humanities at Coventry University. She is also currently President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies.
Naoíse Mac Sweeney is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna, and Principal Investigator of the ERC Project ‘Migration and the Making of the Ancient Greek World’. She studied classics in King’s College Cambridge and ancient history at University College London, and has held research fellowships at both Cambridge and Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. Her research focuses on identity and cultural interaction in the ancient Greek world. She is the author of four monographs, the latest of which, Troy: Myth, City, Icon, was published by Bloomsbury in 2018.
Sofka Zinovieff was born in London, has Russian ancestry and has lived for many years in Greece. She studied social anthropology at Cambridge and carried out research for her PhD in Greece. During the 1990s she lived in Moscow and Rome and worked as a freelance journalist. Her writing has appeared in publications including the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator and the Independent. She is the author of two novels: Putney (2018): ‘an explosive and thought-provoking’ ‘Lolita in reverse’ and The House on Paradise Street (2012), about an Athenian family divided by civil war and which the Guardian called ‘a fiercely absorbing and passionate book’. Her works of non-fiction include Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens (2004), described by The Economist as ‘A witty and engaging account of life in Athens’ and included in the New York Times list of ‘100 Notable Books’. www.sofkazinovieff.com.