Gonda Van Steen holds the position of Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature in KCL’s Centre for Hellenic Studies and Department of Classics.

Van Steen earned a BA and MA degree in Classics in Belgium and a PhD degree in Classics and Hellenic Studies from Princeton University. Her research and teaching interests include Greek language and literature through Byzantine and Modern Greek, Western travellers to Greece and the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth and twentieth-century receptions of the classics and especially of ancient theatre, and modern Greek intellectual and social history.

Van Steen is the author of five books: Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece (2000); Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire (2010); Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands (2011); Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967-1974 (2015); and, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? (2019).