ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU

Anna Despotopoulou is Professor in English Literature and Culture in the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Athens where she teaches 19th, 20th, and 21st- century fiction. She holds degrees in English Studies from the University of Athens (BA), the University of Oxford (M.Phil.), and the University of Reading (Ph.D.). Her research focuses on Victorian literature and culture, Modernism, and Henry James through feminist theory, spatial theory and mobility studies. She was the principal investigator of the research project Hotels and the Modern Subject, 1890-1940 funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation (2020-2023), which studied the theoretical and literary dimensions of the representation of hotels, hospitality, and cosmopolitanism. She also participated in the project Representations of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Culture, also funded by HFRI (Princ. Invest. Efterpi Mitsi). Her publications include the monograph Women and the Railway, 1850-1915  Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and books she has co-edited: Hotel Modernisms (Routledge, 2023), Victorians and Modern Greece: Literary and Cultural Encounters (Routledge, 2025), Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Henry James and The Supernatural (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Transforming Henry James (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), Reconstructing Pain and Joy: Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), and the 3rd special issue of the academic journal Synthesis entitled Experiments in/of Realism. She has published articles on Henry James, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Christina Rossetti, Rhoda Broughton, Joseph Conrad, and Flora Annie Steel in international academic journals such as The Henry James Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in the Novel, The Review of English Studies, George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, Critical Survey etc. and in books published by Blackwell, the MLA, Palgrave-Macmillan, Rodopi etc. In 2016-17 she was elected Associate Visiting Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford and in 2023 she was elected President of the Henry James Society.  http://scholar.uoa.gr/adespoto/home