Foteini Dimirouli is a Research Fellow in English and Access Fellow at Keble College. Her position combines research in the areas of English and Comparative Literature with an active role in setting targets and leading events aimed to increase participation for students from all backgrounds at Oxford University.
In her research Foteini focuses on English and Greek literature of the twentieth century in comparison. Her key topics of interest include transnational literary dialogue, the workings of the cultural field, and the process of canon formation. Her monograph (under contract with OUP) explores the critical and literary contributions of E M Forster, Lawrence Durrell, W H Auden, Joseph Brodsky, Stephen Spender, and James Merrill, to the poet C P Cavafy’s international acclaim. This book draws on authors’ published works and on original archival material; it also leans, for its conceptual framework, on Pierre Bourdieu’s theorisation of the production of literary value. Foteini also takes an active interest in: E M Forster’s work relating to interwar Alexandria; Anglophone cultural journals and their political function; the constitution of the cultural and literary field in Greece during the period of the dictatorship. She is involved in undergraduate admissions and interviews for English at Keble.
Under her widening participation remit, Foteini works closely with the Access Officer to ensure that Keble College attracts students from a wide diversity of backgrounds. She is responsible for an ever-expanding programme of activities with state schools in the West Midlands, the region to which Keble is attached as per Oxford’s regionalisation scheme. Foteini discusses future plans and options with pupils through information, guidance, and academic sessions about the University and higher education more broadly. To this end, she visits schools in the West Midlands, hosts them in College, and seeks to establish college collaboration with third-parties whose efforts are geared toward education equality. She had a leading role in bringing Keble’s Partnership with The Access Project, an education charity operating in the West Midlands, to fruition.