Gonda Van Steen

Fellow, SCAS.
Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, King’s College London

Gonda Van Steen holds the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature
at the Centre for Hellenic Studies and the Department of Classics at King ’s College London. She is the
author of five books including Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece (2000); Liberating Helle-
nism from the Ottoman Empire (2010); Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison
Islands (2011); and Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military
Dictatorship of 1967–1974 (2015). Her latest book, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro
quo? (2019), takes the reader into the new, uncharted terrain of Greek adoption stories, which become
paradigmatic of Cold War politics and history. These adoptions from Greece to the USA, the Netherlands
and also Sweden are among the oldest (and already fraught) post-war international adoptions (starting in
1950 and lasting until the early 1970s), and they merit further study.

Gonda Van Steen is currently working on a project called Adoption Reckonings: Raw Writing (about)
Greek Adoptions of the Cold War Era. She studies the post-war Greek adoption networks and procedures
that placed more than 4,000 Greek-born children abroad, in a movement accelerated by the aftermath of
the Greek Civil War (1946–49) and by the new conditions of the global Cold War. She is also concerned
with the psycho-social aspects of this movement, and her new project lets Greek adoptees lead the narrative,
something that is long overdue. She is further committed to adoptee advocacy in the USA and Greece, in
the hope of effecting change in policies and protocols.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2022-23.