Professor Roderick Beaton

Roderick Beaton grew up in Edinburgh where he first studied Latin and ancient Greek before going on to Peterhouse, Cambridge, to graduate with a BA in English Literature and a PhD in Modern Greek. He came to King’s in 1981, first as Lecturer in Modern Greek Language and Literature, and then from 1988 until his retirement in 2018 as Koraes Professor. For ten years he headed the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (whose functions since 2015 have been taken over by the Department of Classics), and from 2012 to 2018 was Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies.

He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA, 2013), a Fellow of King’s College (FKC, 2018), Commander of the Order of Honour of the Hellenic Republic (2019) and, from September to December 2021, has been appointed A.G. Leventis Visiting Professor in Greek at the University of Edinburgh.

Teaching 

Myth and modern literature; nations and nationalism in the Hellenic world; Romanticism and the making of modern Greece; Classical reception in modern Greece; and (at MA level) the history of the Greek novel in comparative context.

Expertise and public engagement 

I frequently appear in Greek national press and on national radio, as well as many online appearances. I am actively involved in the organisation of events in Greece, the UK and elsewhere to commemorate the 200^th anniversary of the Greek Revolution in 2021, and have already recorded extensive interviews for several TV and film documentaries on the subject.

I am available to the talk to the media about any aspect of current affairs or the modern history and culture of Greece or Cyprus.

For more details, please see my full research profile. 

Selected Publications

• An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature (Oxford University Press, 1994, 2^nd ed., revd, 1999)
• George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel. A Biography (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)
• Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
• Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation (London: Allen Lane/Penguin; Chicago University Press, 2019)
• The Greeks: A Global History (London: Faber; New York: Basic Books, 2021)