TATIANA KONTOU

Tatiana Kontou’s Google Scholar page
Tatiana Kontou’s Orcid ID

Dr Tatiana Kontou is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture, with an emphasis on Literary Theory and Criticism, in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She teaches literary theory and criticism, English fiction, fairy tales and psychoanalysis, and a module entitled ‘1897: A Year in Gothic’. She was previously Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University (2011–2025) and taught at the University of Sussex, where she completed her MA and DPhil. Her research draws on psychoanalysis, theories of gender and performativity, material culture and thing theory, and spectrality, with object-relations psychoanalysis as their meeting point. The archive to which she consistently returns is Victorian literature and spiritualism, particularly the papers of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR).

She is the author of Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and editor of Women and the Victorian Occult (Routledge, 2010). Her co-edited volumes include The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult (Ashgate, 2012) and the six-volume Victorian Material Culture (Routledge, 2022), which grew out of the ‘Victorian Things’ symposium she co-organised in 2013. She has written on psychical research, occult detectives and genre, on Florence Marryat and mourning, and on sensation fiction and spiritualism. Her research has been funded by the British Academy and recognised with a Research Excellence Award from Oxford Brookes University, and she was a member of the research team for REVICTO (Representations of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Culture), a project funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation. She is currently working on a monograph on the lost and revenant child in Victorian culture and psychoanalysis.