Dr Eleni Ponirakis
Associate Lecturer in Christian Spirituality
Email: e.ponirakis@westcott.cam.ac.uk
Eleni is an Associate Lecturer for the ARU MA in Christian Spirituality. Her taught courses include
- MOD008708 Celtic & Medieval Spirituality
- MOD006402 Christian Spirituality East and West
Alongside her role at Westcott, Eleni teaches medieval language and literature (c. 650-1450), most recently at the School of English Language and Literature at UCL. In 2020 she received a Lord Dearing Award for excellence in teaching from the University of Nottingham, where she is currently an Honorary Research Fellow. Eleni also sits on the Committee for the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (ISSEME).
Eleni’s research specialism is in Old English texts, including poetry, homilies, liturgical texts and translations. She is particularly interested in the presence of Greek influence (direct or indirect) in these texts, especially relating to mystical theology. Eleni has published on the influence of Evagrius on Cynewulf’s hagiographical poem, Juliana, and on the translation of Boethius into Old English, where she identified an interpolation from Eriugena’s Periphyseon. She published her first monograph last year, Thought and Action in Old English Poetry and Prose (MIP / De Gruyter) and is preparing her second monograph which aims to give a broader overview of the presence of mystical theology in Old English texts.
In addition, Eleni has edited a collection of essays from a conference she organised at the University of Nottingham on medieval spirituality: Spirits and Spirituality in Medieval Britain and Ireland, c. 600-1400. These are under review with Brepols, hopefully to be published towards the end of 2025 as a special edition of the Nottingham Medieval Journal.
Eleni used to be a keen sailor and although she no longer sails, she has enjoyed using her experience of sailing in an exploration of nautical metaphors in Christian texts.
Publications
Thought and Action in Old English Poetry and Prose (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024).
‘Steering the Ship of the Mind: Politics and Theology in the Nautical Expression of the Layered Mind’ in the Alfredian Translations. SELIM. Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (2024) (Vol. 29, No.1): 53–70.
‘Anhyld þinre heortan eare: Mind as Body in the Sermons of Ælfric’ in Medieval Minds and Matter, special issue of OLHJ, eds. James Louis Smith and Merel Veldhuizen (2024) (Vol. 10, No.1).
‘Hellenic Language and Thought in Pre-Conquest England’ in Multilingualism in Medieval Britain and Ireland: Beyond English, Latin and French, special issue of Anglica ed. Amanda Roig-Marín, (2023) (Vol. 32, No.4).
‘The Place of Stillness: Greek Patristic Thought in Cynewulf’s Juliana’ in Ideas of the World in Early Medieval English Literature, eds. Mark Atherton, Kazutomo Karasawa, and Francis Leneghan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022): 223–48.
‘Deor Line 1: Weland’s Torment Reconsidered’, Notes and Queries 69 (2022), 184–86.
‘Echoes of Eriugena in the Old English Boethius’, Neophilologus, 105 (2021), 279–88.
‘Egill’s Arinbjarnarkviða: How One Praise Poem Can Unlock Another’, Saga-Book, 44 (2020), 57–80.
‘Echoes of Augustine in Genesis B 261-2 and Illustration Junius 11, page 6’, Notes and Queries 67 (2020), 1–4.