Institute for Mediterranean Studies

Eftychia Bathrellou

Postdoctoral researcher
Department of the Ancient and Byzantine World

Eftychia Bathrellou hails from the Mani, in Lakonia, and from an Arvanite community of Attica. She studied Philology and Classics in Athens and Cambridge. Since completing her PhD (Cambridge 2009), she has been Woodhouse Junior Research Fellow in Classics at St John’s College Oxford (2008-12), Teaching Fellow in Greek Literature at the University of Edinburgh (2012-13), Lecturer in Classics at the University of Exeter (2014-15) and Researcher at the Centre for Classical Studies of the University of Lisbon (2015-20).

She is mostly interested in reading Greek texts in the cultural and historical contexts of their production and is particularly fascinated with how a text’s transmission, from its author’s hands to us today, has affected its structure and wording. Her work so far has gravitated towards two poles: the study of Greek comic poetry, especially poetry preserved in papyri, and of representations of slaves and slavery in, mainly, literary works, from the archaic period to late antiquity.

She has published papers and co-edited volumes on comic representations of slavery, on the Athenian comic poet Menander and on textual criticism. She has also co-authored, with Kostas Vlassopoulos, two books on Greek and Roman slavery.