ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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Roderick Macleod Beaton FBA (in Greek transcription: Ρόντερικ Μπήτον) (* 29.) September 1951) is a British neogrecist and was Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London from 1988 to 2018.

Live life
After studying English literature and obtaining a PhD in Neograecistics in Cambridge, Beaton was first appointed Fellow in Modern Greek at the University of Birmingham, 1981 at King’s College London Lecturer in Modern Greek Language and Literature, in 1988 Koraes Professor there. He actively participated in the establishment of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College. From October 2009 to September 2012, he held a Major Leverhulme Fellowship to develop a project entitled: Byron’s War: The Greek Revolution and the English Romantic Imagination. The publication (2013) reads: Byron's War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution. He retired in 2018.

Honors
Beaton has won the Runciman Award four times: 1995 for his introduction to modern Greek literature, 2004 for the biography of Giorgos Seferis, 2014 for his book on Lord Byron and his participation in the Greek Revolution and 2021 for Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation. For the translation of Seferis' Levant Journal, he was awarded the Hellenic Foundation for Culture Translation Award in 2008. In 2019, the President of Greece Prokopis Pavlopoulos appointed him commander of the Order of Honor. Since 2013 he is a member of the British Academy.

Research priorities
Beaton began his career with works on Greek folk poetry from the Byzantine epoch to the modern era, for which he had conducted field research in Greece and Cyprus, and on the Byzantine novel up to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which are characterized by their literary analysis of the subject. With further work on Seferis and Kazantzakis, he has now established himself as one of the leading non-Greek experts in the field of modern Greek literature. After a presentation of the history of modern Greece, which he published in 2019, he wrote a 2021 published global history of the Greeks from the beginnings to the present.

Writings (selection)
The Greeks: A Global History. Faber & Faber, London 2021, ISBN 978-0-571-35356-9.
The Greeks: A Global History. Translated by Ursula Blank-Sangmeister. Reclam, Stuttgart 2023, ISBN 978-3-15-011007-2.
Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation. Penguin, 2019.
Byron's War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2013.
Roderick Beaton, David Ricks (ed.): The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797–1896). Ashgate Publishing, Ltd 2009, ISBN 978-0-7546-6498-7, google.com, accessed 26. March 2023.
From Byzantium to Modern Greece: Me