HOTEMS

“Hotels and the Modern Subject: 1890-1940” (HOTEMS)
Funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation (H.F.R.I.)

Research team: Anna Despotopoulou (Principal Investigator), Efterpi Mitsi, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Athanasios Dimakis, Chryssa Marinou

The research project (2019-2022) focuses on the role of the hotel as a dominant setting, theme, and motif in the cultural theory and Anglophone literature of the wider period of modernism. In our research the literary hotel emerges as a complex cultural phenomenon cultivating urban subjectivity and disclosing many of the aporias of early twentieth-century city life. We explore the ways in which the literary hotel challenges the boundary between public and private; negotiates questions of national identity, nationalism, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism; complicates binaries of gender and sexuality; and demolishes class divides or makes them more pronounced. Our publications, conference presentations, and blog posts synthetically deal with the theoretical and literary implications of the hotel in Anglophone culture. We investigate the emergence of hotels in Greek cities, depicted in the autobiographical and literary works of Anglophone and Greek authors of the period under discussion. Our events (conference, seminars), blog posts, and the web atlas, an interactive digital resource that locates literary hotels on a global map and contains rich textual and visual material, showcase the cosmopolitanism, transculturality and transnationalism that hotels fostered.

Visit our website μας https://hotems.enl.uoa.gr/ and our interactive web atlas which is updated frequently: https://hotems.enl.uoa.gr/projects/hotel-atlas/

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