Nikolas P. Kakkoufa

Nikolas P. Kakkoufa (Ph.D., King's College London) works across literary studies, cultural history, queer theory, reception studies, and the environmental humanities to examine how literature and culture shape and challenge narratives of nationhood, embodiment, sexuality, collective memory, and queer ecologies in modern Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. His research explores how literary and cultural forms reimagine histories, belonging, and futures across Greece, Cyprus, and their diasporas. Before joining Columbia, he taught at Princeton University and the University of Cyprus. He is co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar in Modern Greek and is affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

His current book, A Queer History of Modern Greek Writing (1821–2021), recovers an understudied tradition in Modern Greek literature and history, offering a new account of the emergence and evolution of the Greek nation through the lens of queer writing. Combining literary and cultural history with queer and reception theory, the book examines how writers have claimed and reimagined race, religion, and family, revealing both continuities and ruptures in the history of queer writing across Greece, Cyprus, and their diasporas.

His current research extends this inquiry to the Queer Mediterranean. Forthcoming publications include the article “Can the Queer Mediterranean Speak Back?”, which examines queerness and familial tenderness in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the chapter “Bodies” in The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Mediterranean, among other contributions.

He is also part of Beyond Island Utopias: Transscalar Narratives of Loss, Connection, and Sustainability on Tilos, a collaborative experimental humanities research project co-developed with with Maria Boletsi and colleagues, with support from the Modern Greek Studies Association Innovation Grants and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA). The project investigates the Greek island of Tilos beyond its branding as the Mediterranean's first “energy autonomous” island and model eco-utopia, examining how ecological transition is entangled with histories of biodiversity and extinction, migration and displacement, cultural memory, and planetary ecological change. Combining environmental humanities, archival research, queer theory, creative writing, and speculative cartography, the team develops echography as an experimental methodology for reassembling fragmented archives through collaborative and creative practices that rethink islands beyond narratives of isolation or eco-utopian self-sufficiency.

His work has been supported by a number of international fellowships. In 2020–2021, he was Marilena Laskaridis Visiting Research Fellow in Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam. During the 2024–2025 academic year, he was awarded a Lewis Gibson Visiting Fellowship at the University of Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies and was Visiting Faculty at Reid Hall in Paris, jointly supported by the Columbia Global Paris Center and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

At Columbia, he teaches Modern Greek language courses and interdisciplinary seminars on Queer Bodies (from Antiquity to Futurity), Mental Health in Literature (from Antiquity to the Present), the Poetics of Desire in C. P. Cavafy, the Queer Mediterranean, the Greek Revolution and Its Legacies, and Greece at the Crossroads of Disciplines. He also co-directs the study abroad seminar Mediterranean Humanities in Athens. In 2021, he was awarded a Provost Large-Scale Teaching and Learning Grant for the project Learning Greek from the Streets: An Urban e-Archaeology of the City.

In Spring 2026, he received the Community Building and Engagement Award of Columbia’s Humanities Division in recognition of his dedication to teaching, mentoring, and academic service.

Alongside his research and teaching, he has held several administrative leadership roles at Columbia and has served on the Lecturer Advisory Committee and the Columbia University Senate.

Modern Greek, English, French, Ancient Greek, Latin