Dr. Gonda Van Steen
Cassas Professor in Greek Studies
Gonda Van Steen earned a BA degree in Classics in her native Belgium and a PhD degree in Classics and Hellenic Studies from Princeton University. As the Cassas Chair in Greek Studies at the University of Florida, she teaches courses in ancient and modern Greek language and literature. Her research interests include classical drama, French travelers to Greece and the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth and twentieth-century receptions of the classics, and modern Greek intellectual history.
Gonda’s first book, Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece, was published by Princeton University Press in 2000 and was awarded the John D. Criticos Prize from the London Hellenic Society. Gonda has also published articles on ancient Greek and late antique literature, on the reception of Greek tragedy, on postwar Greek feminism, and on theater, performance, and censorship under the Greek military dictatorship of 1967-1974. Gonda is currently completing a book entitled Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire, in which revolutionary uses of Aeschylus' Persians (1820s) take center stage, and another book on classical tragedies produced by the political prisoners of the Greek Civil War (late 1940s through early 1950s).
