Panagiotis Agapitos studied Byzantine philology, Byzantine art history, and musicology at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich (Mag. Art. 1982), and classical and Byzantine philology at Harvard University (MA 1986, PhD 1990). From 1992 to 2021, he was Professor of Byzantine Philology at the University of Cyprus. He has taught as a visiting professor in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Ghent, and Stanford. He has received scholarships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, and the A. G. Leventis Foundation. Between 2016 and 2020, he was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of European Law in Frankfurt. Since October 2021, he has been a Gutenberg Fellow at the Department of Byzantine Studies at JGU and the Leibniz Wissenschaftscampus “Byzantium between East and West” with a five-year project funded by the Gutenberg Forschungskolleg.
His research interests focus on textual and literary criticism, with a particular emphasis on Byzantine rhetoric, poetics, erotic fiction, and the representation of death in Byzantine literature. He has published about eighty scientific articles, three monographs, and several collections as editor. He also presented the first critical edition of the 13th-century verse novel “Livistros and Rodamni” (Athens 2006) and its English translation with introduction (Liverpool 2021). For several years, he has been working on methodological issues related to the writing of a history of Byzantine literature. He has written three historical detective novels.