Maria Hadjipolycarpou is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Modern Greek and Mediterranean studies.  She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan where she wrote her dissertation entitled, "Poetics of Self in Postcolonial Autobiography: Intersubjective Histories in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean."  Before coming to Illinois she taught at Columbia University (2014 - 2017) and at The City University of New York, Queens College (2017- 2019). Primary areas of interest include literature in the Eastern Mediterranean and the relationship of autobiography, politics, and history; partition and diaspora; Cypriot literature and culture; religion, modernity, and the state; gender, and sexuality in postcolonial literature; global studies; island studies; poetry; orality and oral history. She was a 2013-2014 James A. Winn Graduate Student Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. She was a 2016-2017 Visiting Fellow at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University.