Bart Soethaert

Bart Soethaert is Assistant Professor of Modern Greek Philology (19th–21st centuries) in the Department of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature Studies, and a member of the Laboratory for Philology and New Technologies at the School of Philology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh). He earned his PhD in Modern Greek Studies from Freie Universität Berlin in 2017, with a dissertation that examined how the historical novels of Angelos Terzakis, Pantelis Prevelakis, and Thanasis Petsalis reconfigured the genre in Greek literature through formal innovation and critical engagement with contemporary European thought. He previously completed postgraduate studies in Classical Philology and Modern Greek (UGent, 2004), Comparative Literature (KU Leuven, 2006), and Modern Greek Philology (AUTh, 2008).

His monograph “The Turn towards the Present-Past: Horizons of the Historical Novel (1935–1950) in Greece” (Edition Romiosini, 2018) was awarded the Prize for Best Dissertation from the European Society of Modern Greek Studies. Between 2014 and 2018, he served as project manager for the conception and development of the IT infrastructure of the Center for Modern Greece (CeMoG), including the Online Library of Edition Romiosini (edition-romiosini.de) at the Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS). From 2018 to 2020, he designed the digital platform for the “Online Compendium on German-Greek Entanglements” (comdeg.eu) at CeMoG and coordinated its technical implementation using the Open Encyclopedia System (oes.digital).

At the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” (2019–2025), he has served as Academic Coordinator and, since October 2023, as Principal Investigator and Moderator of Research Area 5 “Building Digital Communities.” In addition to his research on the global reception of Nikos Kazantzakis (1946–1988), he has coordinated the functional and technical development of the digital journal “Articulations” (articulations.temporal-communities.de) and contributed to the remediation of the Cluster’s core concepts and methodologies in the digital domain.

In 2022, Bart Soethaert conducted the seminar “Digital Remediations: The Cavafy Files” at the International Cavafy Summer School, “Cavafy Mediated.” In 2027, together with Maria Akritidou, he will co-direct the International Cavafy Summer School, “Archival Explorations: The Cavafy Archive and Digital Scholarship.”