Margaret Alexiou

Margaret Alexiou was born in Birmingham, England, in 1939, the daughter of classical scholar George Thomson and Katherine Fraser. Family friends included the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and her father's Marxist readings of Aeschylus were part of the intellectual climate of her childhood. She studied classics at the University of Cambridge, where she was close to Jessie Stewart, a student of Jane Harrison, and went on to earn a doctorate before beginning her university teaching career.

Alexiou taught for roughly two decades at the University of Birmingham, helping to build Modern Greek and Byzantine literary study in Britain. She then moved to Harvard University as George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature, succeeding George Savvidis in the Seferis Chair, and later became professor emerita. Her books The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (1974) and After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor (2002) became touchstones for scholars working across classical, Byzantine and modern Greek materials. She also published on modern Greek writers including Georgios Vizyenos, Stratis Myrivilis and C. P. Cavafy, and on oral and folk tradition as living counterparts to the literary canon.

She married Christos Alexiou, a Greek philologist, academic, author and honorary member of the Society of Greek Writers. Known to many colleagues as Meg, she divided her working life between British and American universities and kept strong ties to Greece through fieldwork and scholarship. In later years she lived in England; she died at her home in Walmer, Kent.

Margaret Alexiou died on 16 September 2026 at her home in Walmer, Kent, aged 87. Harvard's Department of Comparative Literature announced her death on 22 September 2026, describing her as one of the most impactful and generous Neohellenists of the previous fifty years. Greek and English-language outlets including eKathimerini, Kathimerini and Greek City Times carried obituaries that stressed both her books and her mentorship.

Alexiou's legacy rests on a comparative method that refused to isolate antiquity from Byzantium or modern Greece, and on the many students she guided into the field. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition remains a standard reference for mourning song and ritual speech, while After Antiquity continues to frame debates about myth, metaphor and linguistic continuity. Harvard remembered her as a colleague who opened research areas; Greek commentary marked her as a teacher of three generations.