Research Programme, Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens: hotems.enl.uoa.gr.
Funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation (H.F.R.I.)
Principal Investigator: Anna Despotopoulou. Professor in English Literature and Culture in the Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
Research team: Anna Despotopoulou (Principal Investigator), Efterpi Mitsi, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Chryssa Marinou, and Athanasios Dimakis.
The research project “Hotels and the Modern Subject: 1890-1940” (HOTEMS, 2019-2023) focuses on the role of the hotel as a dominant setting, theme, and motif in the cultural theory and Anglophone literature of the wider period of modernism. In our research the literary hotel emerges as a complex cultural phenomenon cultivating urban subjectivity and disclosing many of the aporias of early twentieth-century city life. We explore the ways in which the literary hotel challenges the boundary between public and private; negotiates questions of national identity, nationalism, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism; complicates binaries of gender and sexuality; and demolishes class divides or makes them more pronounced. We also investigate the emergence of hotels in Greek cities, as reflected in the autobiographical and literary works of British and Greek writers of this period. Anna Despotopoulou (Professor in English Literature and Culture in the Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) is the programme principal investigator, with the group research team also including: Efterpi Mitsi, Professor, NKUA, Vasiliki Kolokotroni, Senior Lecturer, University of Glasgow, Chrysa Marinou, Postdoctoral Researcher, NKUA and Athanasios Dimakis, Postdoctoral Researcher, NKUA.
As part of the research, the programme successfully organized the international conference "Literary Hotels" (Athens, September 2021: hotems.enl.uoa.gr/events/). Selected papers from the conference have been published in a volume of collected essays (Hotel Modernisms, Routledge, 2023). Essays by research group members will be published in the volume The Greek Hotel in Greek and British Literature (Hellenic Open University Press Publications, forthcoming). Other publications include articles in international volumes and scholarly journals such as: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies, Language and Literary Studies of Warsaw, Literary Geographies, Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean (Palgrave, forthcoming). Research team members have presented papers at the international conference of the International E. M. Forster Society (June 2021), at the “Literary Hotels” conference (Athens, September 2021) and, for outreach and dissemination purposes, at an international seminar co-organized with the University of Guelph, Canada research group project "Hotels in History". The international conference "Hotels and Crisis: Historical and Cultural Perspectives" took place in London (June 25-26, 2022). The programme webpage hosts a blog with short essays critically analyzing literary hotels, as well as an original, interactive online atlas that places literary hotels on the world map including rich visual material (postcards, hotel ephemera), as well as various excerpts. The website is continuously enriched with the addition of new material: hotems.enl.uoa.gr.