Christos K. Tsagalis is Professor of Ancient Greek Philology at the Department of Philology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a Member of the European Academy of Sciences (Academia Europaea) in the Class of Classical Philology and Oriental Studies. He is a Corresponding Member of the Cyprus Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Arts in the Class of Letters, and Arts, as well as a Member of the Board of Directors and Director of the Department of Language and Literature at the Centre for the Greek Language in Thessaloniki.
He is internationally recognised as a leading scholar of Archaic Greek epic poetry, with a research profile focusing on Homer, Hesiod, and the early epic tradition. His work has made significant contributions to the study of oral tradition, intertextuality, and the reception of classical texts.
His scholarly contribution has been regarded as a landmark in the study of Greek epic poetry, as he established oral, intertextual neoanalysis as an interpretative method for Homeric poetry. Through this approach, he developed criteria that enable the combined application of oral theory and neoanalysis, the two dominant theoretical frameworks in contemporary Homeric scholarship. His work has been characterised as an original reassessment of the implications of these theories, aiming to overcome their limitations and introduce a more flexible and critical approach to established scholarly models. At the same time, his systematic study of fragmentary Greek epic poetry of the Archaic and Classical periods, a field largely neglected and not associated with the Epic Cycle, has contributed decisively to a broader understanding of Archaic Greek epic beyond Homer and Hesiod.
His monographs, published by leading international academic presses, including Walter de Gruyter, Harvard University Press, and Oxford University Press, his studies published in collective volumes by Oxford and Cambridge University Press, as well as the four-volume series Early Greek Epic Fragments (Walter de Gruyter), have become essential references in international research on Archaic Greek epic poetry. His work has renewed philological methodology by highlighting less studied texts and introducing new interpretative models.
He has held research Memberships at the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University (2002 and 2014), was a postdoctoral researcher supported by the State Scholarship Foundation of Greece (2000–2001), and a researcher at the Foundation for Education and European Culture (2010, 2017).
For his scholarly achievements, he has received the Academy of Athens Award in Classical Philology (2007), the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Excellence Award in Humanities and Social Sciences (2017), and the Excellence Award for Senior Researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences of the same university (2025). His research project for the annotated edition of fragments of ancient Greek epic poets ranked first in the Humanities category and was funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (ELIDEK) for the period 2019–2022.
He is the editor of the Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic (Brill), editor of the monograph series Key Perspectives on Classical Research (Walter de Gruyter), assistant editor of the series Trends in Classics Supplementary Volumes (Walter de Gruyter), and a member of the scientific advisory board of the series of annotated editions of ancient authors Aris & Phillips Classical Texts.
Overall, he has authored 18 books, 78 articles and studies, and 21 book reviews; he has (co-edited 15 collective volumes, contributing numerous chapters, supervised the translation of seventeen books into Greek, and delivered more than one hundred scholarly lectures in Greece and abroad.
