Society for Modern Greek Studies | Gendered Archive Trouble: The Case of Eva Palmer Sikelianos by Artemis Leontis

Tuesday 02 Jun 2026

This paper reimagines the archive as both concept and tangible reality through a gendered lens. Tracing the dramatic journey of the youthful love correspondence of performer, director, weaver, and philhellene Eva Palmer Sikelianos—from private collection to public custody in libraries of national significance in Paris and Athens—I explore a passage marked by concealment, suppression, and shifting access. Initially entering this world as a researcher and unexpectedly evolving into the role of archivist, I experienced firsthand the labour and careful deliberation involved in records creation and preservation. Decentering the traditional focus on a singular, remarkable (often male) creator, this case foregrounds the multiplicity of contexts and actors whose imaginative and relational efforts shape women’s archives. The story unfolds across boundaries of intimacy and institution, exposing persistent struggles over visibility and access. Archives emerge, in this view, not as static repositories, but as dynamic terrains of struggle, negotiation, and affect—where women’s creative legacies are continually made and remade, contested and reclaimed.

*Please note, all texts will be adapted to fit our requirements and inhouse marketing style terrains of struggle, negotiation, and affect—where women’s creative legacies are continually made and remade, contested and reclaimed.

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Artemis Leontis

Artemis Leontis is C.P. Cavafy Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature and Director of the Modern Greek Program at the University of Michigan. She is currently Editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies and of the new book series, “Greek/Modern Intersections,” published by the University of Michigan Press. She is the author of Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (1995); Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins (2019, Greek translation 2021), and the coeditor of “What These Ithakas Mean…”: Readings in Cavafy, among other books. Her current research projects include a digital archive of the correspondence of Eva Palmer and Natalie Clifford Barney and a book following the fraught path of Eva Palmer Sikelianos’s love letters, highlighting the imaginative, relational, and contested processes that shape women’s archives