Billie Mitsikakos

Generously supported by the AHRC, the Clarendon Fund, and Merton College, and supervised by Professor Dimitris Papanikolaou, my DPhil project examines the works of literature and art that are in direct conversation with the poetry and the authorial figure of C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933). Hailed both as one of Greece’s national poets and as an international queer icon, Cavafy’s work is mediated by discourses of homophobia and nationalism, while also being adopted by queer subcultures as a platform for identity expression. By probing into a complex network of ideological debates, identifications and disavowals, Cavafy’s ‘becoming myth’ is revealed fuelled by a power struggle of competing discourses, driven by opposed political, cultural, and academic agendas. My interest lies in the way this debate can be read against Cavafy’s own writing and its proposition of alternative futurities through parrhesiastic strategies of homoerotic liberation, and the overflowing of queer affect. How do these characteristics of Cavafy’s poetry create communities of trauma and transformational reparation, innovative modalities of (inter)textuality and performativity, as well as new ways of being together and meaning differently? Consequently, my project ventures to underscore the possible contribution of Cavafy’s mythopoesis to queer historiography. Albeit shadowed and silenced, queer Cavafy and his afterlives manage to empower processes of collective self-proclamation, re-emergence, and resistance. Before coming to Oxford, I read for a BA in Philology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (graduated with distinction) and for an MA in Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne, supported by a Ioannis S. Latsis Foundation scholarship.