Email: [email protected]
Phone: 646-312-4026 | Location: NVC 7-271
Christina Christoforatou is Associate Professor of English specializing in medieval literature (Western-European and Byzantine), manuscript studies, and medieval cosmology. A native Athenian, she completed her secondary education in Greece before moving to New York to pursue undergraduate and graduate studies at the City University of New York. Her research interests have taken her back to Greece and to various European libraries—national and monastic—where she has studied the manuscripts of the romances she was spoken and written on.
Her scholarship ranges broadly over medieval cultural poetics, Byzantine intellectual history, and iconographic expressions of power. Her essays examine the institutional and symbolic relation of literature to politics linking the role of the Byzantine literati to the court, the aftermath of political upheaval, and to figurations of power in literary and artistic commissions. They have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Enarratio (formerly PMAM), Italian Culture, Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Cultures in Confluence and Dialogue, Journal of the History of Sexuality (JHS), and others. She has co-authored and co-edited, Desire and Eroticism in Medieval Europe, Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries: Sex Without Sex (University of Texas Press, 2010). Currently, she is currently working on a monograph that examines the interplay of sexual and political iconography in Byzantine literary texts, and the influence of imperial patronage to literary evolution.
Before joining Baruch College, Professor Christoforatou taught courses in literature and composition at other colleges, where she had the opportunity to introduce Writing Across the Curriculum. At Baruch, she teaches courses in Writing and Composition, Great Works of Literature, electives in ancient and medieval poetics, survey courses in Medieval and Renaissance literature, and interdisciplinary seminars. She has also served as Interim Coordinator for Writing Across the Curriculum and as Assessment Director for the English department’s evaluation of English Majors and Minors. She currently serves on the Faculty Senate’s Executive Committee, the College’s Educational Policy Committee, the Committee on Planning and Finance, the Executive Committee of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, and the Committee on Undergraduate Academic Standing. In addition, she is participating faculty at the Macaulay Honors Program, the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, and the Harman Writer-in-Residence Program. In 2024-2025, she will be serving on Baruch College’s Governance Review Committee.
Outside of CUNY, she serves as vice president of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America (where she also co-directs BSANA’s Graduate Student and Early Career Programs that contribute to the Association’s DEI initiatives), is affiliated with the Medieval Academy of America, the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, the Athens Journal of Humanities and the interdisciplinary journal Diogenes. She has served twice on the programming committee of the International Congress on Medieval Studies and the programming committee for the Byzantine Studies Conference.
SCHOLARLY INTERESTS
Medieval European poetics, late-antique literature and culture, especially Greek and Roman, Byzantine intellectual history (11th-15th centuries), Middle English literature, language and culture, reception studies (especially the reception of ancient rhetoric, philosophy, and the novel), Renaissance Humanism, literary theory, folklore, orality, performance, material culture (11th-15th centuries), gender and sexuality studies, race, identity and alterity
SELECTED COURSES
ENG 2100: Writing I | ENG 2150: Writing II
ENG 2800: Great Works of Literature I | ENG 2850: Great Works of Literature II
ENG 4100: Early English Literature | ENG 4120: Chaucer
ENG 4110: Medieval Literature | ENG 5000: Ancient Greek Poetics
ENG 4710: Medieval Romance: Comparative Approaches
ENG 6001: Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur
IDC 4050: Political Literature from the Athenian Republic to the Global State
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Christoforatou, C. (2022). Book Review. “The Tale of Livistros and Rodamne.” A Byzantine Love Romance of the 13th Century. Trans. and ed., Panagiotis A. Agapitos. (Translated Texts for Byzantinists 10.) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021. Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, 97(4), 1147-1148.
Christoforatou, C. (2015). “Ontologies of Power in the Sovereign Politics of Pindar and Machiavelli.” Italian Culture, 33(2), 87-104.
Christoforatou, C. (2011). “Figuring Eros in Byzantine Fiction: Iconographic Transformation and Political Evolution.” Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Cultures in Confluence and Dialogue, 17(3), 321-359.
Christoforatou, C. (2010). “The Paradox of Sovereignty from Pindar to Byzantium.” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 22(4), 349-70.
Christoforatou, C. and Sally N. Vaughn, eds. (2010). Desire and Eroticism in Medieval Europe, Eleventh to the Fifteenth Centuries: Sex Without Sex. Austin: University of Texas Press.
RECENT PRESENTATIONS
Christoforatou, C. (2025). “Romancing Power in Byzantium.”
Christoforatou, C. (2023). “Seeing in the Mind’s Eye: Theories of Consciousness from Aristotle to Bachelard by Way of Byzantium.”
Christoforatou, C. (2023). “Manuscripts, Cultures and Ideas of the Move: Reflections on the Sinai Palimpsests Project and the Contents of a Manuscript that Travelled from Constantinople to Sinai.”
Christoforatou, C. (2023). “Making Space for Byzantium’s Imaginative Poetics: New Discoveries and Turns in Literary Studies.”
Christoforatou, C. (2022). “Exalting Eros through Logos: Performing Passion and Imperial Power in Byzantine Fiction.”