Staff profile

George Alexander Gazis is Associate Professor in Greek Literature and Philosophy at the Department of Classics and Ancient History. His main research interests lie in Archaic Greek Epic and Lyric in general, Plato and the Early Academy, as well as Athenian drama. He is especially interested in the function of mortality and the afterlife in the Homeric Epics, early Lyric (especially Stesichorus, Pindar and Bacchylides), and the Platonic afterlife narratives. In his first monograph Homer and the Poetics of Hades (2018, OUP) he explores the ways in which epic tradition is recast and retold in the Homeric Hades of Odyssey 11 from the shades’ personal point of view.  He is the editor of the volumes Aspects of Death and the Afterlife in Greek Literature (LUP, 2021), and Homer in Sicily (Parnassos Press, 2023) while he is currently preparing an edition, translation and commentary of the pseudo-epigraphic Letters of Euripides with Dr A. Giannotti for Aris&Phillips Classical Texts, while at the same time he is working on his second monograph Ghosts on Stage: Spectres, Spectacles and Alternative Memories in Athenian Drama which focuses on a cognitive interpretation of the phenomenology of the tragic stage and the ways in which it influenced the reception of tragic plays by the early Athenian audiences. Furthermore, George is interested in the study of the Bronze Age in the Aegean and the Near East as the timeframe in which what came to be known later as the Greek Epic tradition was first formed. He is particularly interested in the study of Bronze Age Aegean material culture alongside the Linear B records as a gateway for the reconstruction of the socio-economic system of the Mycenaean civilisation that gave rise to that tradition. 

• Archaic Greek Epic and Lyric
• Epic Cycle
• Hades
• Homer
• Linear B
• Near Eastern Epic
• Tragedy and Comedy

Authored book

• Gazis, G. (2018). Homer and the Poetics of Hades. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198787266.001.0001

Book review

• Gazis, G. (2018). Sammons B. Device and Composition in the Greek Epic Cycle. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Classical Review, 68(2), 317-9
• Gazis, G. (2012). Lopez-Ruiz C. When the Gods Were Born – Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2010. The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 132, 234-5. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075426912000651

Chapter in book

• Gazis, G. (2021). Beyond the Stream of the Ocean: Hades, the Aethiopians and the Homeric eschata. In H. Marlow, K. Pollmann, & H. Van Noorden (Eds.), Eschatology in Antiquity. Routledge
• Gazis, G. (2021). What is your lot? Hades and the Afterlife in Greek Lyric. In G. Gazis, & A. Hooper (Eds.), Aspects of Death and the Afterlife in Greek Literature. Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789621495.001.0001
• Gazis, G., & Papachrysostomou, A. (2014). Echoing Hippocrates: Aspects of Genre Intertextuality in the 5th Century BC. In D. Michaelides (Ed.), Medicine and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Oxbow

Edited book

• Gazis, G., & Hooper, A. (Eds.). Aspects of Death and the Afterlife in Greek Literature. Liverpool University Press

Journal Article

• Gazis, G. (2018). Voices of the dead: Hades narratives in the Odyssey and Bacchylides’ Ode 5. Trends in Classics, 10(2), 285-305. https://doi.org/10.1515/tc-2018-0022
• Gazis, G. (2015). The Nekyia’s Catalogue of Heroines: narrative unbound
• Gazis, G. (2011). Odyssey 11: the power of sight in the invisible realm