Dimitris Plantzos

Dimitris Plantzos is a Professor of Classical Archaeology at the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens and Director of the University’s BA Program in the Archaeology, History and Literature of Ancient Greece. His research interests include classical reception in the modern age, archaeological theory and the history of ancient Greek art. A highly prolific writer, he does not shy away from sensitive and politically contentious subjects. In his 2014 Archaeologies of the Classical. Revising the Empiricist Canon, he provides an overview of archaeological method in the post-positivist era, and in his 2016 Recent Futures. Classical Antiquity and Modern Greek Biopolitics, he sets out to explore how classical antiquity is deployed in modern Greece as a biopolitical tool. In the collective volume The Monuments of Others, published in 2023, he grapples with unwanted inheritances of memory and oblivion, and in Archaeopolitics: The Second Lives of Statues, he unpacks the fraught relationship between archaeology and politics, sparking a discussion that in Greece remains both necessary and controversial. He has also published important reference works that have been translated into English, including Greek Art and Archaeology c. 1200-30 BC (Kapon, 2016) and The Art of Painting in Ancient Greece (Kapon, 2018). His most recent study Athens Demapped: Archaeology, Heritage, and Urban Transformation (Coimbra University Press, 2025) explores the entangled relationships between classical heritage, memory, and modernity in the evolving city of Athens. Plantzos was born in Alexandria, Egypt, but can trace his roots to the island of Limnos. He is a member of the international archaeological mission to the Ptolemaic Cemetery of Shatby in Alexandria and is the co-director (with Dimitris Damaskos) of the Argos Orestikon Excavation Project. In 2024, he was elected to be a Corresponding Member at the 146th Meeting of the Council of the Archaeological Institute of America.