Dr. Christos Hadjiyiannis

I joined the department at Regensburg in May 2023. I was previously Research Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Cyprus (2017-22); Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Texas at Austin (2019); and Research Fellow in English Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford.

I am the Chair of International Relations for the Modernist Studies Association. Please do get in touch if you'd like to find out more about what we do. 

My research interests lie in two main areas: modernist literature, especially the relationship between modernist literature and politics; and modern and contemporary poetry, particularly the way in which British and North American poets from the 1960s onwards have been appropriating ancient, late antique, and medieval ideas and tropes of sacrifice and martyrdom into their works. 

My first monograph, Conservative Modernists: Literature and Tory Politics in Britain, 1900-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), considered in detail the surprising ways in which early Anlophone modernism was imbricated with Tory rhetoric and ideology. With Rachel Potter, I edited The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature & Politics (2023). You can watch a little video conversation with me and Rachel talking about the book here. I continue to retain an interest in the politics of modernism: I've just finished writing an essay on G. K. Chesteron's conservatism and I'm currently working on a book chapter on George Orwell's socialism. 

Over the last few years, I've become fascinated with how modern and contemporary poets like Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Shane McCrae, Claudia Rankine, Ada Limón, Ocean Vuong, Alice Oswald, and Fiona Benson have been drawing on and appropriating old ideas of sacrifice and martyrdom to talk about a range of themes, including love, loss, inequality, and injustice. I am writing a little book for Cambridge University Press called Poetry and Suffering, in which I sketch out poetry's long and multifaceted fascination with suffering to hone in on three contemporary poets - Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, and Ada Limón - who have been questioning traditional male fetishisations of suffering as something noble and necessary for artistic inspiration and creation. I hope to then write a longer book, conceived under the title Modern Martyrs: Martyrdom in Modern and Contemporary Poetry, in which I will attempt a transhistorical examination of poems written in Britain and the US over the last sixty years through the prism of texts of a very different time (300-1500 CE), geography (Byzantium), and language (Greek). I've recently published an essay (available in open access) on Djuna Barnes's 'byzantine modernism' that pairs her novel Nightwood with Byzantine stories of holy fools and transgenders; that's the kind of thing I hope to do more of in the book. 

Many of the martyrs memorialised in these Byzantine texts were exiles and refugees. Another developing interest is refugee writing: I plan to write something about the first-century late antique Christian text Acts of Thecla and the poetry of George Seferis and Ingeborg Bachmann. Finally, remaining committed to interdisciplinary and collaborative work, I am currently developing, together with a colleague, an edited volume - the first of its kind - on Literature and Photography. 

Books

• (2024) Poetry and Suffering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Under contract. 
• (2018) Conservative Modernists: Literature and Tory Politics in Britain, 1900-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Edited Volume

• (2023) Ed., with Rachel Potter. The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature & Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Journal Articles

• (2015) "We Need To Talk About Ezra: Ezra Pound's Fascist Propaganda'. Journal of Modern Literature. 39.1: 112-26.
• (2015) "Modernist Poetics, Conservative Politics: J. M. Kennedy's Tory Democracy". English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 58.3: 385-402.
• (2013) "Romanticism versus Classicism in 1910: T. E. Hulme, Edward Storer, and The Commentator". Literature & History. 22.1: 25-41.

Chapters

• (2024) "G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill". The British Novel of Ideals: George Orwell to Zadie Smith. Eds. Matthew Taunton and Rachel Potter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming. 
• (2023) "Avant-Garde". Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism. Ed. Maria Margaroni. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 277-286.
• (2023) "Introduction: Literature and Politics". Co-authored with Rachel Potter. The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature & Politics. Eds. Hadjiyiannis and Potter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-16.
• (2023) "Liberal Democracy". The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature & Politics. Eds. Hadjiyiannis and Potter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 19-35.
• (2022) "The Byzantine Modernism of Djuna Barnes". The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion. Eds. Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 494-508.
• (2021) "'Spilt Religion': Heresy in Classical Modernism". Heresy and Borders in the Twentieth Century. Eds. Karina Jakubowizc and Robert Dickins. London: Routledge. 66-83.
• (2016) "Cultures of the Avant-Garde". Oxfort 21st-Century Approaches to Literature: Late Victorian into Modern, 1880-1920. Eds. Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 85-102.
• (2015) "Logic of the Heart: Affective Ethical Valuing in T. E. Hulme and Max Scheler". Modernism and Affect. Ed. Julie Taylor. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 66-74.
• (2013) "Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, Edward Storer: Imagism as Anti-Romanticism in the Pre-Des Imagistes Era". Imagism: Essays on its Initiation, Impact and Influence. Eds. John Gery, Daniel Kempton and H. R. Stoneback. Intro. Helen Carr. New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press. 35-46.

Encyclopaedia Entries

• (2018) "Imagism"; "Romanticism vs. Classicism". Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism. Eds. Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Olga Taxidou. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 
• (2016) "T. E. Hulme"; "Hugh Kenner"; "Harriet Monroe". Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Ed Stephen Ross. 

Book Reviews

I review academic and general non-fiction books regularly. They are too many to mention here, but some indicative reviews are: 

• (2020) Review of: Lyndsey Stonebridge, Placeless People: Writing, Rights and Refugees (Oxford, 2019), Arendt Studies. 4 (2020): 14-19. 
• (2019) Review of: Patricia Pye, Sound and Modernity in the Literature of London, 1880-1918 (Palgrave, 2017), English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 62.3: 89-92.
• (2018) Review of: The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell, eds. Allan Pero and Gyllian Phillips (Florida, 2017), The Times Literary Supplement, 19 January 2018: 30.
• (2015) Review of: Katherine Ebury, Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights (Palgrave, 2014), The Times Literary Supplement, 27 March 2015: 30. 
• (2014) Review of: Mark Byron, Ezra Pound's Eriugena (Bloomsbury, 2014), The Times Literary Supplement, 26 September 2014: 26-27.
• (2014) Reviw of: Oliver Tearle, T. E. Hulme and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2014), Modernism/modernity: 21.2: 575-77.

I attend conferences and present on my work regularly. Some recent talks are: