Argyro Nicolaou

Argyro Nicolaou

Department of Comparative Literature
anicolaou@fas.harvard.edu

Argyro Nicolaou is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Critical Media Practice. Her research focuses on shared and/or divided spaces in the Eastern Mediterranean and how these are represented in the writings of local and foreign authors who were also diplomats in the second half of the 20th century. A major point of interest for her research is the cultural implications of division & its various manifestations in Cyprus, from the Republic’s constitution, which provides for shared guarantor powers between Greece, Turkey and the UK, to the current geopolitical status quo with the island space divided between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, but also British sovereign bases and the UN. How do such divisions affect our understandings of what is, or should be, a ‘whole’ and what is a (lacking) part?

Her CMP capstone project will explore one of the many paradoxes of division on the island by documenting the summer routines of well-off Greek Cypriot families that own beach houses in the popular tourist destination of Protaras, less than 10 miles away from what used to be the island’s premier tourist resort in the 1970s, the city of Varoshia, now a ghost town.

Argyro’s first film, a narrative short titled ΗΜΙΣΥ (In Half) was completed in early 2015. It tells the story of an eccentric artist whose obsession with halves inspires her to create a work of art that ultimately seals her fate.