Eleni Theodoropoulos is a writer, translator, and scholar. She is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative thought and literature at Johns Hopkins University where she works on experimental nonfictional narratives written by women. This includes the essay and other hybrid forms which play with subjective modes of narration and, especially, gesture toward or fracture into a plural or collective I. At Hopkins, she works as a tutor at the Writing Center, has worked as an assistant editor for the scholarly journal Modern Language Notes, and has co-founded the translation group called the Translation Circle, which hosts regular translation workshops among graduate students as well as events with visiting translators. After earning a Dean’s Teaching Fellowship, she will be teaching a course on the twentieth-century personal essay as written, shaped, and crafted by women writers. She previously earned her B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied humanities and creative writing. Her essays and editorial work have appeared on Literary Hub, in Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Hopkins Review. She initiated and co-edited the special forum in Modern Language Notes entitled “Translators Reimagine Literary Citizenship in the Academy,” eight essays by scholar translators who speak to their experience of translating and teaching translation within academia. She translates from Modern Greek, has worked for Greek publisher Patakis, and her published translations can be found online.
During her 2024-2025 U.S. Fulbright-IKY Ph.D. Research Award, Eleni will be researching the modernist Greek author Melpo Axioti (1903-1973) and translating Axioti into English for the first time. Specifically, she will be translating Axioti’s last, lyrical autobiographical novel Kadmo (1972). Notwithstanding Melpo Axioti’s status as one of Greece’s earliest modernists, the sociopolitical mythmaking following her political exile from Greece during the civil war combined with the fact that no English translations of her books exist, Axioti has yet to properly enter the global modernist canon. So, Eleni will spend the majority of her time at the archives housed in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki containing Axioti’s bibliography, correspondence, and biographical history as well as the work of her contemporaries. To complement her research, she will take short trips to visit Axioti’s ancestral home in Mykonos and interview former colleagues of hers in Athens. With the support of affiliate professors at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Panteion University in Athens, who are experts on Axioti’s life and work, Eleni hopes that her Fulbright project will help bolster the literary inheritance of one of Greece’s most important authors by shepherding Axioti’s work into English and highlighting her rightful place in a comparative modernist genealogy.
