Georgios E. Markou studied Archaeology and History of Art at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens before pursuing an MA on ‘Venice and Its Legacies’ at the University of Warwick. In 2018, he completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge and subsequently held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the British School at Rome. From September 2021 to December 2023, Georgios was based at the University of Cambridge as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of History of Art. Building upon - but also transcending – its basis in micro-history, his project “Art and Exile: Biographies of displacement in the early modern Mediterranean” offers an alternative cultural panorama, by moving beyond generalizations to capture a highly connected world where artistic exchange was fundamentally mediated by the complex biographies of the individual artists who circulated within it.



Focusing on the example of Venetian Cyprus and the hitherto unrecognized artistic and cultural patronage of the island’s elite families, Georgios's first monograph challenges previously held assumptions about a culturally and confessionally rigid Greek Orthodox community. Through the integration of textual and material evidence, his inaugural book-length study will offer novel insights that refine concepts of fluid identity, wherein individuals projected cultural characteristics traditionally thought of as oppositional. Concurrently, Georgios is in the process of preparing a monograph on the Melian painter Antonio Vassilacchi, known as L’ Aliense. Grounded in the examination of unpublished documentary sources, this forthcoming volume is poised to provide illuminating insights into the life and contributions of this historically overlooked Greek master.