Open Call | International Cavafy Summer School 2025: Cavafy and Egypt

The International Cavafy Summer School is an annual scholarly initiative of the Cavafy Archive and the Onassis Foundation, focused on Cavafy, his work, and his archive while aiming to explore his poetry’s impact on the world from new cultural and academic perspectives.

Since its inauguration in 2017, the International Cavafy Summer School has aimed to enrich and strengthen participants’ knowledge of Cavafy’s poetry and to encourage future research collaborations between junior and senior scholars from diverse disciplines. Themes explored in previous Summer Schools have been “Cavafy in the World,” “Cavafy and Antiquity,” “Cavafy’s Orient/ations,” “Cavafy Mediated,” “Cavafy across the Disciplines and the Arts,” and “Cavafy, Theater, and Performativity.” The theme for the 2025 Summer School will be “Cavafy and Egypt.”

The 2025 Summer School invites comparative, interdisciplinary proposals both on the poetics and politics of Cavafy in relation to Egypt and on broader intercultural, not least Egyptian-Greek, engagements with and beyond his corpus. As his poetry and prose attest, Cavafy did not only spend most of his life and die in the country of his birth; he was also, among others, of Egypt—an Egyptiote whose positionality and texts open a window onto the complexities of Greek-Egyptian convergence and divergence, as well as cosmopolitan and internationalist Mediterranean legacies. We welcome proposals engaging Cavafy in relation to contemporary Egyptian poets; his reception in Arabic poetry and prose, as well as Arab cinema and the plastic arts; Arabic translations of his texts; comparative studies of the intertextual and intermedial resonances of things Egyptian/Arab in Greek, Egyptiote, and European texts produced by Cavafy’s contemporaries, including varieties of orientalism; Homeric mythology in Cavafy’s poetry in relation to the reimagining of ancient Greek myths in Egyptian/Syro-Lebanese literary culture, particularly inflected by the Nahda (Arab reawakening/renaissance).

For mor information: https://www.onassis.org/open-calls/open-call-international-cavafy-summer-school-2025-cavafy-and-egypt