Konaris Michael

Michael Konaris studied at the Universities of Oxford (BA Literae Humaniores, double first, MSt in Modern History, DPhil in Ancient History) and Cambridge (MPhil Classics). He held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Freie Universität, Berlin with a DAAD grant, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He has been a visiting member of the Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, an academic visitor at the Faculty of Classics at Oxford, an Onassis fellow at the National Hellenic Research Foundation, a research fellow at the Research Centre for the Humanities, and an associate scholar of the Swedish Institute at Athens.

His research interests lie in the history of classical scholarship and especially in the history of the study of Greek religion and mythology as well as in the history of comparisons between ancient Greece and China. He is currently working on the correspondence of Martin P. Nilsson with James Frazer, E.R. Dodds, A.D. Nock and other major 20^th century classical scholars and also co-editing a volume on the Multiple Antiquities of Greek Modernity from the 19^th to the 21^st century.

He is the co-ordinator of a series of lectures on Greek mythology at the Research Centre for Greek and Latin Literature of the Academy of Athens that run from December 2022 to June 2023: http://www.academyofathens.gr/en/research/centers/greeklatin/lectures22-23

Select Publications

Books

• The Greek Gods in Modern Scholarship. Interpretation and Belief in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Germany and Britain (OUP, 2016)

Articles & Book Chapters

• ‘Thucydides and the Causes of the Peloponnesian War in 19th-century Historiography: the Case of Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos versus George Grote and Ernst Curtius’, in N. Marinatos and R. Pitt (eds.), Thucydides the Athenian (CYA, 2022), pp. 287-305

• ‘The Sins of Euemeros against Truth and Honesty: Indo-European Comparative Mythology versus Euhemerism in Victorian Britain’ in S. Pugh (ed.), The Mortal Gods: Euhemerism and its Uses from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2021), pp. 219-240

• ‘Myth or History? Ancient Greek Mythology in K. Paparrigopoulos’ History of the Hellenic Nation (1860-1874). Controversies, Influences and Implications’ in Historical Review / La Revue Historique, vol. 16 (2019), pp. 211-234

• ‘Dionysos in Nineteenth-Century Scholarship’, in R. Schlesier (ed.), A Different God? Dionysos and Ancient Polytheism (De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 467-478

• ‘Apollo in Nineteenth-Century Scholarship: the Case of K.O. Müller’, in M. Haysom and J. Wallensten (eds.), Current Approaches to Religion in Ancient Greece (Svenska institutet i Athen, 2011), pp. 13-22

• ‘The Greek Gods in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century German and British Scholarship’, in J.N. Bremmer and A. Erskine (eds.), The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations, (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 483-503