Institute for Mediterranean Studies

Kostas Vlassopoulos

Associate Professor of Ancient History
University of Crete
Department of the Ancient and Byzantine World

Kostas Vlassopoulos was born in Patras in 1977 and is a Greek historian. He obtained his PhD in ancient Greek history in 2005 from the University of Cambridge. From 2005 to 2015 he worked as a lecturer and associate professor of ancient Greek history at the University of Nottingham. Between 2015 and 2019 he taught ancient history as an assistant professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Crete, and since 2019 he has been an associate professor in the same department. In 2019 he became an associate faculty member at the Institute of Mediterranean Studies (IMS) of FORTH, and since 2022 he has been Director of the Department of the Ancient and Byzantine World at IMS. He has also designed two courses on the relationship between Greeks and barbarians on FORTH's Mathesis online courses platform. He has taught as a visiting professor at universities in Belgium, Brazil, Canada and USA. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Ancient History and of Brill's Research Perspectives in Ancient History series. He has been awarded the Hare Prize for the best PhD thesis of the year 2005 in Classical Studies at Cambridge, and the prestigious British Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2012 for his contribution to Classical Studies.

His research interests are directed towards a variety of topics, including the history of ancient slavery, the history of globalization and intercultural relations in antiquity, comparative history, and the history of ancient political thought and its modern reception. He is the author of seven monographs and dozens of articles, and has co-edited four collective volumes. His books include the following: Greeks and Barbarians (2013), Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World (2015), My whole life: everyday stories of slaves from antiquity (2020), Historicising Ancient Slavery (2021), The Blackwell Sourcebook of Greek and Roman Slaveries (2022), and Enslaved Persons and their Multiple Identities in Ancient Societies (2022).

http://crete.academia.edu/KostasVlassopoulos

Recent publications: 

E. Bathrellou & K. Vlassopoulos, Greek and Roman Slaveries, Wiley Blackwell (2022).

‘Christianity and slavery: towards an entangled history?’, Post Augustum, 5, (2021), 62-103.

‘A Gramscian approach to ancient slavery’, E. Zucchetti & A. M. Cimino (eds.), Antonio Gramsci and the Ancient World, Routledge (2021), 101-23.

‘Subaltern community formation in antiquity: some methodological reflections’, C. Courrier & J. C. Magalhães de Oliveira (eds.), Ancient History from Below: Subaltern Experiences and Actions in Context, Routledge (2021), 35-54.

Historicising Ancient Slavery, Edinburgh University Press (2021).

Κώστας Βλασόπουλος & Ε. Μπαθρέλλου, Η ζωή μου όλη: καθημερινές ιστορίες δούλων από την αρχαιότητα (My whole life: stories from the daily life of ancient slaves), Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης / Cretan University Press (2020).

‘Hope and slavery’, D. Spatharas & G. Kazantzidis (eds.), Hope in Ancient Literature, History and Art, De Gruyter (2018), 239-62.

‘Historicising the closed city’, M. Dana & I. Savalli-Lestrade (eds.), La cité interconnectée: transferts et réseaux institutionnels, religieux et culturels aux époques hellénistique et impériale, Ausonius (2018), 43-57.

‘Marxism and ancient history’, D. Allen et al. (eds.), How to Do Things with History: New Approaches to Ancient Greece, Oxford University Press (2018), 209-35.

I. Xydopoulos, K. Vlassopoulos & E. Tounta (eds.), Violence and Community: Law, Space and Identity in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean World, Routledge (2017).

‘Does slavery have a history? The consequences of a global approach’, Journal of Global Slavery, 1 (2016), 5-27.

‘Que savons-nous vraiment de la société athénienne?’, Annales HSS, 71.3, (2016), 659-81.

C. Taylor & K. Vlassopoulos (eds.), Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World, Oxford University Press (2015).

‘Plotting strategies, networks and communities in classical Athens: the evidence of slave names’, C. Taylor & K. Vlassopoulos (eds.), Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World, Oxford University Press (2015), 101-27.

‘Religion within communities’, E. Eidinow & J. Kindt (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion, Oxford University Press (2015), 257-71.

‘Ethnicity and Greek history: re-examining our assumptions’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 58 (2015), 1-13.

Greeks and Barbarians, Cambridge University Press (2013).

Selected Publications