Stathis Gourgouris was born in Hollywood (1958) and grew up in Athens. He is a poet, essayist, translator, sound artist, and professor of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is the author of Dream Nation (1996- 25th Anniversary edition, 2021); Does Literature Think? (2003); Lessons in Secular Criticism (2013); The Perils of the One (2019), and editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (2010), Thinking with Balibar (2020), and The Cavafy Dossier (2021). His new book, Nothing Sacred, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press (2024). He has also published numerous articles on ancient Greek philosophy, political theory, modern poetics, film, contemporary music, and psychoanalysis. He writes regularly in internet media (such as Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera, Open Democracy), as well as major Greek newspapers and journals on political and literary matters. A collection of such essays on poetics and politics, written in Greek over a period of 25 years (including a number of unpublished pieces), was published in 2016 with the title Ενδεχομένως αταξίες [Contingent Disorders].

He is an internationally awarded poet, with four volumes of poetry published in Greek and translated into English, German, French, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese. He has translated a number of Greek poets in English, and in Greek the poetry of Robert Creeley, Carolyn Forché, H.D, James Merrill, Heiner Müller, and Derek Walcott. In 2022, he published Piercing Red, an English translation of the collected verse of Lena Platonos. His poetry, music, and visual art collaborations have been presented in various festivals and installations including UKS Archives in Oslo, ICA in London, documenta 14 in Athens, Megaron Thessalonikis, Montreal Pop Festival, SynTalk in Mumbai, STUDIOvisits Gallery in Berlin, Ambersand International Art Gallery in San Francisco, and 4th International Poetry Festival in Sapanca, Turkey. In 2019 he was a Finalist in the V Edition of International Flash Fiction Competition, Fundación César Egido Serrano, Museo de la Palabra, Madrid, Spain.

He is a member of the Hellenic Authors Society and co-founder of the Sublamental Artists Collective. He has served as Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (2009-2015) and the Program in Hellenic Studies (2020-23) at Columbia; President of the Modern Greek Studies Association (2006-2012); and at the Board of Supervisors of the English Institute, Harvard University (2006-2009) and the Cavafy Archive at the Onassis Foundation (2017-2025). Among his many awards, most notable is the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award (Columbia’s highest honor) in 2015 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2023.

For details of his recent work: http://stathisgourgouris.com/

For discography: https://countg.bandcamp.com/

An extensive interview with the Serbian philosopher Obrad Savić, covering the whole range of his work, can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books: Part I “Dream Nation and the Phantasm of Europe”; Part II “Poetics and the Political World”.