Kostas Vlassopoulos

My current research interests focus on three different, though related, subjects. The first one is the study of subaltern groups (poor citizens, foreigners, slaves) in ancient Greece.  I have recently published Historicising Ancient Slavery (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), a volume that presents a new framework for writing the history of ancient slave systems. This involves examining slaves not merely as passive objects of exploitation, but also as active subjects of history; but it also means studying ancient slavery not as a static entity that lasted for a millennium, but as the complex result of a series of interacting processes. I have also co-authored a sourcebook (Greek and Roman Slaveries, Wiley Blackwell, 2022) which applies the above framework to a rich collection of literary, epigraphic, papyrological and archaeological sources of the ancient Mediterranean world, ranging chronologically from the archaic period to late antiquity. I am co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), a volume with a strong theoretical, historiographical and comparative perspective which aims to revolutionise the ways we study ancient slaveries. I have also co-edited a volume on Communities and Networks in Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2015).

My second area of research focuses on the effort to rethink Greek history outside Eurocentric and Hellenocentric assumptions and to situate it within a wider Mediterranean and Near Eastern perspective, a project which I have initially explored in my first book, Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History beyond Eurocentrism (Cambridge University Press, 2007). I have recently published a book titled Greeks and Barbarians (Cambridge University Press, 2013). My aim is to challenge the currently prevailing model of a deep polarity between Greeks and non-Greeks by exploring the variety of ways in which Greeks related to non-Greeks and to situate these interactions within processes of globalisation in the ancient Mediterranean.

My third area of research concerns the history of historiography and political thought. I try to bring together the history of classical scholarship with the intellectual history of early modern and contemporary Europe. The aim is to show that the study of the past is neither the value-free exercise that positivist historians would make it, nor the continuous construction of novel fictions, as the post-modernists would have it. My book Politics: Antiquity and its Legacy (I. B. Tauris / Oxford University Press: 2010), examines the reception of ancient political thought in modern times.
Phone: 0030 28310 77360
Address: Department of History and Archaeology, Panepistimioupoli Gallou, University of Crete, Rethimno, 74100, Greece