Elliot Koubis

I am a DPhil candidate in French and Modern Greek at St. John’s College, University of Oxford. I hold a BA in French and Modern Greek Literature from St. Peter’s College, Oxford, and an MSt in Modern Greek from Worcester College, Oxford supported by an Onassis Scholarship. My research is supported by an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP studentship and a Clarendon Fund Scholarship.

My thesis, supervised by Dimitris Papanikolaou and Marie-Chantal Killeen and entitled ‘Homochrononormativity: New Queer Times in French and Greek Literature’, will explore how we might reconsider queer temporalities in the European political landscape in the light of recent queer life-writing and biographical film in French and Greek-speaking cultures. As part of the project, I will perform symptomatic readings of ‘coming out’ narratives in both languages as cultural documents to explore whether queer communities feel pressured to develop their sexuality or gender according to certain biopolitical norms.

My main academic interests include: queer life-writing; bisexuality in literature and culture; the sexual and political uses of texts by queer readers; the poetry of Constantine Cavafy; translation theory and ‘author-translators’, as well as post-colonialism and queer necropolitics.

I am also the author of the poetry collection 'Echoing' (2017) and English translations of stories by Guillaume Apollinaire ('The Stories and Adventures of the Baron D’Ormesan', 2017) and Henri Barbusse ('Bombardment', 2017) from the French, all from Ampersand Publishing. I am a member of the Greek Studies Now research group and Queer Intersections Oxford.