Vasiliki Dimoula

Visiting Fellow

  • Concentration
    Greek Linguistics and Literature
    AffiliationOpen University of Cyprus
    Research Project:
    Organics, Transcendental Materiality and Subjectivity in Byzantine and Renaissance Medicine, Literature and Art

Vasiliki Dimoula received her first degree in Philology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2002) and her MA (2004) and PhD (2008) at King’s College London (Department of Comparative Literature). She has been awarded scholarships from the State Scholarships Foundation of Greece, the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation and the Fulbright Foundation. In 2011-2012 she worked as a visiting lecturer at the University of Cyprus and was an adjunct lecturer at the Open University of Cyprus from 2012 to 2015. She is currently affiliated as a postdoctoral fellow at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her academic interests include classical reception, the history of medicine and the intersections of psychoanalysis, literature and culture. A revised and expanded version of her thesis (Human and More than Human: The Problematics of Lyric Poetry, Ancient and Modern) was published in English by the Kostas and Helen Ouranis Foundation (Athens, 2014).

About the Research Project

Organics, Transcendental Materiality and Subjectivity in Byzantine and Renaissance Medicine, Literature and Art

In recent years, and as a result of the ongoing dialogue between the humanities, medicine and the neurosciences, concepts of mind-body relationship are concentrating an intense academic interest and are being revisited from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. My research project attempts a contribution to this discussion, by focusing on the ‘organ’ of the human body as a multivalent term and as an original way to discuss affect and the subject at the intersections of medicine and literature in different historical periods. In terms of theory, a basic assumption of my research is that symbolic and cultural coordinates become the condition of the structural availability of the organ beyond its functional regime at the level of the organism. While at Princeton, I propose to consider conceptualizations of the organ in Byzantine and Renaissance medical and literary texts, where Christianity also plays an important overdetermining role, and to discuss the resulting tensions, as well as often uncanny affinities, between the religious discourse and the somatic foundation of subjectivity in the medieval and early modern period.

Previous Roles

  • Visiting Research Fellow
    2015 - 2015