Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood

Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood (; 26 February 1945 – 19 May 2007) was a scholar in the field of Ancient Greek religion and a highly influential Hellenist.

Biography Sourvinou-Inwood was born in Volos, Greece, in 1945, but grew up in Corfu. Sourvinou-Inwood studied at the University of Athens from 1962 to 1966, where she specialised in history and archaeology, and was a pupil of the Greek prehistoric archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos.

Sourvinou-Inwood moved to the United Kingdom in 1969. She completed her Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in 1973 with a thesis titled "Minoan and Mycenaean afterlife beliefs and their relevance to the Homeric underworld".

She worked as a lecturer in classical archaeology at Liverpool from 1976 to 1978. Later, she returned to her alma mater and was a senior research fellow at University College, Oxford from 1990 to 1995, and before being Reader in Classical Literature at the University of Reading from 1995 until her retirement in 1998.

Research and influence After her initial research into Minoan and Mycenaean Greece, Sourvinou-Inwood moved to studying Archaic and Classical Greece, in particular Greek religion, employing evidence from a wide variety of sources including material culture and iconography as well as literary texts, mythology, and ritual practices. she insisted on the need to eliminate anachronistic modern assumptions from the study of the ancient world in order to reconstruct the perceptions, beliefs, and ideologies of people in the ancient world. In 2018, the Festschrift Πλειών. Papers in memory of Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood was published by the University of Crete, edited by Athena Kavoulaki. This followed a memorial conference that was held in 2012 in Crete.

Polis-Religion Model One of Sourvinou-Inwood's most influential works was her development of the 'Polis-religion' model, which demonstrated how the ancient Greek city (polis) controlled religious life. This was originally explored in two articles, entitled "What is Polis Religion?" and "Further Aspects of Polis Religion"; the former has been described as "unquestionably the most influential article on Greek religion of the last 25 years". Gedenkschrift:

Selected works

Non-fiction Theseus as Son and Stepson: A Tentative Illustration of Greek Mythological Mentality (1979); Studies in Girls' Transitions: Aspects of the Arkteia and Age Representation in Attic Iconography (1988) "Reading" Greek Culture: Texts and Images, Rituals and Myths (1991); "Reading" Greek Death: To the End of the Classical Period (1995); "What is Polis Religion?" and "Further Aspects of Polis Religion" in Oxford Readings in Greek Religion (edited by Richard Buxton 2000) Tragedy and Athenian Religion (2003); Athenian Myths and Festivals: Aglauros, Erechtheus, Plynteria, Panathenaia, Dionysia (posthumously edited and published by Robert Parker 2011);

Novels Murder Most Classical (under the pseudonym Christiana Elfwood, 2007); Murder at the City Dionysia (2008); Murder near the Sanctuary (2008);