Gonda A. H. Van Steen

Gonda Van Steen holds the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature in the Centre for Hellenic Studies and Department of Classics at King’s College London. She is the author of many articles and five books: Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece; Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire; Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands; Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967-1974, and Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece (2019, in Greek: Ζητούνται παιδιά από την Ελλάδα: Υιοθεσίες στην Αμερική του Ψυχρού Πολέμου). Gonda most recently edited The Battle for Bodies, Hearts and Minds in Postwar Greece: Social Worker Charles Schermerhorn in Thessaloniki, 1946-1951, and she co-edited The War for Anatolia and the Remaking of International Order: Greece, Turkey and the End of the First World War. She published an adoption-related playscript with a lengthy introduction, called Adoption Reckonings: For Three Refrigerators and a Washing Machine (2025). She co-leads the campaign Nostos for Greek Adoptees and achieved legal breakthroughs on behalf of Greek-born adoptees.