Biography

Clio-Ragna Takas is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, working on early modern theatre in Greek, English, and Italian. She read English and Modern Greek at the University of Oxford, where she also earned her MSt in Byzantine and Modern Greek Literature. Her research interests include premodern travel writing, trans-imperial contact zones, and Renaissance world-making, translation studies, folk song, oral poetry, and performance.

Project Summary

While at I Tatti, Clio will be undertaking research which will inform her doctoral thesis, “Oneiric Stages: Cognitive Confusion and Ritual Poetics in Early Modern Greek Drama”. Her thesis centres on a corpus of 16th-17th century Greek plays largely unknown outside of Greece, produced in Crete, the Ionian islands, and the Cyclades. These include a variety of anonymous religious plays, as well as the corpuses of Cretan Renaissance playwrights, Georgios Chortatsis and Ioannis Andreas Troilos. Influenced by the comparative work on early modern drama by Louise George Clubb, Robert Henke, and Joachim Küpper, her research brings these plays into dialogue with their English and Italian counterparts; the works of G.B. Giraldi, Giambattista Della Porta, William Shakespeare and William Killigrew, among others. She takes a phenomenological, historicist approach to theatre, which probes at the interaction between histories of theatre, ritual, and the imagination.