Congratulations to Eleni Theodoropoulos, who has been selected to receive a Fulbright-IKY Ph.D. Research Award.

During her 2024-2025 U.S. Fulbright-IKY Ph.D. Research Award, Eleni will be researching the modernist Greek author Melpo Axioti (1903-1973) and translating Axioti into English for the first time. Specifically, she will be translating Axioti’s last, lyrical autobiographical novel Kadmo (1972). Notwithstanding Melpo Axioti’s status as one of Greece’s earliest modernists, the sociopolitical mythmaking following her political exile from Greece during the civil war combined with the fact that no English translations of her books exist, Axioti has yet to properly enter the global modernist canon. So, Eleni will spend the majority of her Fulbright at the archives housed in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki containing Axioti’s bibliography, correspondence, and biographical history as well as the work of her contemporaries. To complement her research, Eleni will take short trips to visit Axioti’s ancestral home in Mykonos and interview former colleagues of hers in Athens. With the support of affiliate professors at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Panteion University in Athens, who are experts on Axioti’s life and work, Eleni hopes that her Fulbright project will help bolster the literary inheritance of one of Greece’s most important authors by shepherding Axioti’s work into English and highlighting her rightful place in a comparative modernist genealogy.

Congratulations to Eleni!