Maria Boletsi is Assistant Professor at the Film and Comparative Literature department of Leiden University, the Netherlands. She received her Ph.D. from Leiden University (2010) and has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University. She has published on several topics, including the concept of barbarism, post-9/11 literature and political rhetoric, contemporary Greek literature, street art and subjectivity in the context of the Greek ‘crisis.’ Her recent book publications include Barbarism and Its Discontents (Stanford University Press, 2013), the co-authored book The Lightness of Literature (published in Dutch: De lichtheid van literatuur) on the function of literature in the multicultural society (Acco 2015) and the edited volume Barbarism Revisited: New Perspectives on an Old Concept (Brill 2015, co-edited with Christian Moser). She currently works on a book on spectrality in C.P. Cavafy’s poetics and his poetry’s contemporary afterlives. She is also main partner in an international project on the modern conceptual history of barbarism, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).