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Dr. Alexander Grammatikos - "Early Nineteenth-Century British Travellers, Greek Literature and Education, and the Idea of a Europeanized Greece" 

Alex discusses how popular travelogues of the early nineteenth century, including Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and John Cam Hobhouse’s A Journey through Albania, and Other Provinces (1813), used Modern Greek education and Romaic (vernacular) literature as a way to assess Greek national character and to determine how amenable Greece was to absorption into Europe’s sociopolitical structure. A closer look at the ways in which Romantic-era writers engaged with Romaic and vernacular Greek culture, he suggests, gives us a fuller picture of the series of dialogues and discourses that went into “Europeanizing Greece” less than a decade before the outbreak of the 1821 Greek War of Independence began to make this prospect a reality.

Alexander Grammatikos completed his Ph.D. at Carleton University (2017) and is an Instructor at Langara College. Alex's research specialties include British Romanticism and early nineteenth-century Greek culture. In his book British Romantic Literature and the Emerging Modern Greek Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Alex investigates the ways in which late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British writers constructed Modern Greece and its people, and how these literary engagements with Greece produced and complicated Britain’s relationship with the then emerging Greek nation.

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