Before joining the German Department at the NYU (2021) Ioanna studied in Athens (Kapodistrian University) and Berlin (Humboldt University) German Literature and German as a Foreign Language (DaF), linguistics, comparative literature and Ancient Greek.
She has worked on the poetics of chance and contingency in pre-modern and modern literature such as in Robert Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities. In her comparative work on Franz Kafka’s Office Writings and Kostas Karyotakis’ ‘clerk employee’ poetry she examined the interaction between modern literature and bureaucracy before the historical background of the emerging welfare state in the decline of both the Habsburg and Ottoman Empire.
Her research interests include the theory and practice of translation, Surrealism, psychoanalysis’ intersections (as a theory and a clinical practice) with literature, philosophy and the arts. Ioanna has translated Andreas Embirikos’ poetry, prose and programmatic texts of the Greek Surrealism movement into German. For the translation of Blast Furnace [Υψικάμινος] with Turia + Kant (2022) she received the grant extensiv initiativ of The German Translator Fund (Deutscher Übersetzerfonds/Neustart Kultur).
She is currently working on the poetics of exhaustion in Samuel Beckett’s prose and on various literary translations into German and Greek. In cooperation with the Psychoanalytic Library Berlin (PsyBi) she has organized workshops and readings while she is the host of the study group Surrealism and Psychoanalysis.