DIRECTOR’S BOOKSHELF
An Agora of Ideas
Seeger Center Director Dimitri Gondicas in conversation with
Maria Boletsi
The Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies supports more than a dozen fellows each year who conduct intensive research at Princeton. Former Seeger fellows have published hundreds of books with leading publishers and thousands of articles. Their scholarship reflects the broad, interdisciplinary nature of Hellenic studies, spanning fields from history to religion to literature and periods from antiquity to the present.
In the February 13, 2025, edition of Director’s Bookshelf, Seeger Center Director Dimitri Gondicas speaks with Maria Boletsi about “Specters of Cavafy,” published by the University of Michigan Press in 2024. Boletsi was a visiting fellow at the Seeger Center in 2016. She is the Marilena Laskaridis Chair of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam and an associate professor in literary studies at Leiden University.
How did this book project begin?
As an M.A. student in 2004, I wrote a paper on speech acts in Cavafy’s poetry. My late teacher, John Neubauer, encouraged me to publish that paper, which appeared in “Arcadia” in 2006. It was my first published article and planted the seeds for this book. Yet it feels as if I had been writing this book my whole adult life, even when I didn’t know yet that I was writing it. This is because Cavafy’s poems have been partners in thinking for me — as for so many others — haunting my writing, shaping my thinking, and accompanying my experiences since I got hooked on his poems as a teenager. I tend to filter almost every important or new situation, idea, or project through Cavafy’s poems. This book was my attempt to make sense of the haunting effect Cavafy’s poetry has on me (and many others).
Please tell us about your time at the Seeger Center and the research you conducted then.
At the Center, I could indulge in being a bookworm. I spent almost every day in Firestone Library, collecting and reading sources. I scanned a library’s worth of material, which I used until I finished the book. The best thing about essentially living in a library is the serendipitous encounters with books you would have otherwise never noticed or looked up. Such encounters led me to delve into publications on ghosts, spirituality, and the occult in Cavafy’s time and to explore the relation of photography and technology to haunting and spectrality. This material found its way into the book, albeit slantwise.
In addition to being surrounded by books, I was surrounded by fellows and faculty during weekly seminars at the Center and other academic and social events. Discussing Cavafy with wonderful people was a real treat. I also made a couple of friends for life. Not bad for a semester’s work!
How did that research and your participation in the Seeger Center’s academic community impact your work and this book project?
My stay at the Seeger Center was a catalyst for this book. It provided me with a stimulating environment, inspiring interlocutors, and one of the most valuable and rare commodities today in academia: research time away from teaching and other work commitments.
What would you like your readers to learn?
I revisit Cavafy’s writings and their bearing on our present through the figure of the specter and the vocabulary of haunting, taking my cue from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994) and other theorizations of specters. I develop spectrality as a lens for approaching Cavafy’s poetics — his spectral poetics — and his poetry’s afterlives today. Cavafy’s writings haunt our present but are also haunted — that is, conjured again and again in new shapes and forms – by our present and its concerns. I hope readers gain an understanding of how this two-directional haunting works. Considering the vast scholarship on Cavafy’s work, many people have claimed nothing new can be said. However, this claim becomes moot if we approach past literary works as dynamic forces that shape and are shaped by future presents. Then, their signifying force keeps shifting without reaching an endpoint. Cavafy’s poetry is marked by loss and death, yet it also persistently explores the conditions for keeping death and endings at bay, reanimating the past, and perpetuating signifying transactions with ever-new presents. I hope readers experience such new, surprising signifying transactions so that they can say, “Hey, I hadn’t thought of this poem or prose text in that way before.”
A transformative journey to Greece inspired Stanley J. Seeger to found Hellenic studies programs at Princeton. Please tell us about a journey that expanded your intellectual horizons or influenced your research.
As an undergraduate at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, I took my first long trip outside Greece, spending a semester in Amsterdam. In this multicultural city, I stepped out of my comfort zone culturally, intellectually, and academically. I took courses in Modern Greek studies (at the department where I ended up working years later). I was exposed to approaches in comparative literature and cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam, which inspired me to continue studying these fields and cultivating my love for literary theory. My time in Amsterdam made me realize how essential it is to leave home, literally and figuratively, to return to it from new, critical, estranging perspectives. This centrifugal impulse still drives every interdisciplinary project I pursue and my approach to Modern Greek studies. That journey also gave me a new home, as I live in Amsterdam today.
Photo of Dimitri Gondicas by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy.
https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/maria-boletsi#tab-1