On Wednesday March 26, Prof. Norbert Bugeja spoke at the A.G. Leventis Gallery in Nicosia, Cyprus, where he was invited to address the presentation event for the recently published, transdisciplinary cultural studies volume ‘Shifting Horizons and Crossing Borders: Thinking with Stephanos Stephanides’ (Brill, 2024), edited by Prof. Angelos Evangelou.
In his remarks, Prof. Bugeja spoke about his long-standing collaboration and friendship with acclaimed poet, filmmaker, scholar and former University of Cyprus professor Stephanos Stephanides, a leading voice in contemporary Mediterranean writing and scholarship.
Speakers at the book presentation event included volume editor Prof. Angelos Evangelou, Dr Nesrin Degirmencioglu, Dr Marilena Zackheos, Prof. Jacqueline Jondot, and Stephanides himself.
The volume carries a chapter by Prof. Bugeja, titled ’A Polity in Poetry? Notes on the Edge(s) of Memory in Stephanos Stephanides’s ‘The Wind Under My Lips’’, as well as a conversation Bugeja had conducted with Stephanides a few years ago, titled ‘Poetics of a Sea’, which had originally appeared in the Journal of Mediterranean Studies.
‘Shifting Horizons and Crossing Borders: Thinking with Stephanos Stephanides’ features wenty-three contributions together with the editor’s introduction, and includes work by Susan Bassnett, David Dabydeen, GJV Prasad, Keki Daruwalla, Jacqueline Jondot, Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, the late Geoffrey V. Davis and various other contributors.
In his appraisal of the volume, foremost literary scholar Djelal Kadir, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, has observed that ‘Stephanos Stephanides's oeuvre has overrun geographical, linguistic, poetic and genre borders, leaving a legacy for posterity that will also outrun time in the cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries. The voices in this volume that invoke and celebrate, in polyphony, the achievement of one of the most multifaceted cultural figures of our time comprise a collective of distinguished writers in their own right.’
