Lena Liapi

Biography

I came to Keele in September 2017.  I have taught at the University of York, the University of Aberdeen, and Leeds Beckett University. I did my first degrees at the University of Athens (BA & MA) and my PhD at the University of York.

Research and scholarship

My research interests revolve around popular culture, print culture, representations of deviance, rhetoric, and material studies. I am also particularly interested in historiography and theoretical approaches to history.

My doctoral thesis focused on the ways in which urban crime was represented in cheap print materials in early-modern London. Cheap print was used to investigate broader phenomena, such as urbanisation and the growth of the metropolis, popular understandings of justice and the culture of communication in early modern England.

My current research aims to locate popular fame and reputation in seventeenth-century England. Using manuscript and printed sources, I am exploring whether fame was a product of the printing press, or based on face-to-face interactions which spilled over to print. How do individuals become famous? Are local networks of news more important than country-wide distribution? My research engages with these questions and the interaction between community and public opinion.

Teaching