Greek Laughter and Tears Book Launch and Talk, King’s College London, December 11, 2017, 6:30–8:30 pm

Book Launch for Greek Laughter and Tears: Antiquity and After, edited by Margaret Alexiou and Douglas Cairns (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), with a talk by Niels Gaul (University of Edinburgh): “Tears and Laughter in Medieval Constantinople (Episodes from Michael Psellos and Niketas Choniates).”

Margaret Alexiou is George Seferis Professor Emerita of Modern Greek Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She is  the author of The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (1974, revised edition 2002) and After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor (2002). In autumn 2013 she was A.G. Leventis Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh and co-convenor of the international conference on which Greek Laughter and Tears is based.

Douglas Cairns  is Professor of Classics in the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include language, emotion, and society in Classical Greece; history of distributed cognition; ancient emotions in Byzantine Greek; honour and status in classical Greece. His study of Sophocles’ Antigone was published by Bloomsbury in 2016.

Niels Gaul is A.G. Leventis Professor of Byzantine Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He currently is the Principal Investigator of a Byzantinist-Sinologist project funded by the European Research Council, ‘Classicising learning in medieval imperial systems: cross-cultural approaches to Byzantine paideia and Tang/Song xue’. His study of the late Byzantine author Thomas Magistros (in German) was published in 2011.

Registration required.