Dr Georgia Petridou BA(Hons), MPhil, PhD
Senior Lecturer in Ancient Greek History Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology
- Work email Georgia.Petridou@liverpool.ac.uk
- Personal Websiteacademia.edu
About
Personal Statement
I am a proud Athenian, but I have lived and worked abroad for most of my adult life. In Athens, I completed my BA (Hons) in Classical Philology, and moved to beautiful Scotland to work on my MPhil at the University of Glasgow, where I was fortunate enough to work with Alex Garvie on Homer, early Greek lyric poetry and tragedy. In 2009 I returned to Scotland, this time at the University of St. Andrews, to teach Greek literature and Classical studies for a year.
A strong desire to delve further into Greek Literature and Religion brought me to the University of Exeter, where I completed a PhD thesis on the concept and the context of divine epiphany in Greek literature and culture under the guidance of Richard Seaford. After the completion of the thesis and inspired by Stephen Mitchell's work on Greek and Roman epigraphy, I joined the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara as a research fellow to work further on my 'epiphanic inscriptions'. The fascination with this unitque form of direct communication with the past only inscriptions can offer has never really left me.
My enthrallment with epiphanies lead me naturally to the author who claimed to have experienced a plethora of divine manifestations, Aelius Aristides and the exciting socio-cultural milieu of the second sophistic. Aelius Aristides and the unique entanglement of medicine and religion in his Hieroi logoi became my new research focus and the topic of my second monograph.
A research fellowship with the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung funded research project 'Medicine of the Mind-Philosophy of the Body' in Berlin allowed me to explore the medical aspects of Aristides' Hieroi Logoi under the direction of Philip van der Eijk; while working as a research assistant at the European Research Council funded project ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ at the Max-Weber Kolleg in Erfurt and under the expert guidance of Jörg Rüpke, Richard Gordon and Rubina Raja, I was able to focus more on the religious aspects of the Hieroi Logoi.
I joined the ACE team (Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology) at Liverpool in October 2016, where I teach and continue my research on the intersections of Greek literature, ancient history of medicine and Greek and Roman religion.
It goes without saying that I would be thrilled to work with postgraduate students in any of the aforementioned research fields.