Student Seminars and Workshop at the School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (October 2022-January 2023)

In the context of the elective module “English Modernist Fiction,” offered to 4th year students of the Department of English and taught by Prof. Anna Despotopoulou, there has been a focus on literary hotels through two seminars led by the postdoctoral researchers of the project, Dr Chryssa Marinou and Dr Athanasios Dimakis. The students themselves presented papers on modernist hotels in a workshop that took place on January 9th 2023.

Seminar programme:

7 November 2022: Dr Chryssa Marinou on Elizabeth Bowen’s “Salon Des Dames”

28 November 2022: Dr Athanasios Dimakis on E.M. Forster’s “The Story of a Panic”

Workshop programme: click here

Highlights from our London Workshop (June 2022)!

Many thanks to all the participants.

25-26 June 2022

The HOTEMS team members Athanasios Dimakis, Chryssa Marinou, Efterpi Mitsi, and Anna Despotopoulou participated with papers in the London Workshop co-organized by HOTEMS and “The British Hotel in War and the Transition to Peace, 1914-22” project of the University of Guelph, Canada.

Details and programme here.

Conference Participation

Athanasios Dimakis participated in the REVICTO conference (8-9 April 2022) with a HOTEMS presentation entitled:

“That’s the modern Greek all over”: Disenchantment in the Khan in E.M. Forster’s “The Road from Colonus”

The Bodosakis Foundation website, BLOD (Bodosakis Lectures on Demand), hosts the videos of the panels “Hotels in Times of War and Crisis” and “The Greek Hotel” from our September 2021 conference.

Many thanks to BLOD for inviting and including the HOTEMS symposium in its collection of important cultural, academic and scientific events taking place in Greece.

Watch the panels here: https://www.blod.gr/events/ksenodoheia-sti-logotehnia/

The HOTEMS International Symposium

9-10 September 2021

Keynotes by:

Dr. Vassiliki Kolocotroni (Glasgow Univ. and international research member of HOTEMS) “Hotel Trouble”

and

Professor Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent Univ.),  ‘“Rest. Stay.” Life in the Hotels of Katherine Mansfield

Our keynote speaker, Andrew Thacker, delivered his talk remotely.

“The Greek Hotel” Panel

The HOTEMS international symposium (9-10 September 2021) featured a panel (in English) on the Greek hotel in literature and culture:
Mathilde Pyrli, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens/ELIA/MIET
The Athenian Hotel in Transition: from Inns to Grand Hôtels, 1840-1910 
Efterpi Mitsi, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
George Gissing’s Grand and Modest Hotels in Late Nineteenth-century Athens
Polly Hember – Online, Royal Holloway, University of London
Stirring the ‘sub-aqueous memory’ in H.D.’s Hotel Mira-Mare 
Vassilis Letsios – Online, Ionian University
Ithacas: Cavafy of Travel, Ships, Hotels
For more on Greek hotels at the conference see:
Nikos Filippaios, University of Ioannina
“The Most Original Hotel of the World”: Memory, Crime and Tourism in Giannis Maris’ The Hands of Aphrodite (1963)

E. M. Forster by Lady Ottoline Morell (1922)

Conference participation

Athanasios Dimakis presented his HOTEMS paper entitled

“That was what the place wanted […] a man”: The Hotel as (Counter) Site of (Queer) Possibility in E. M. Forster’s “Arthur Snatchfold” at the E. M. Forster – Shaping the Space of Culture International E. M. Forster Society Conference, University of Warsaw, University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, Poland. Online, 7 June 2021

See also our relevant blog post on “Gennaro! Genarro!”