Spyridoula Athanasopoulou-Kypriou is Lecturer in Social and Political Theology at the Department of Primary Education of the University of Crete. She graduated from the Department of Theology of the School of Theology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and holds postgraduate degrees in the fields of religions and theology from the University of Manchester, as well as in Integrative Psychotherapy from the University of Derby. She received her PhD from the University of Manchester in 2002, where, as a scholar of the Greek State Scholarships Foundation, she completed a doctoral dissertation on the relationship between theology and literature. She worked for twenty-two years in private secondary education as a teacher of Religious Education. She has taught at the Universities of Manchester, Athens and the Aegean, and for fourteen years, from 2006 to 2020, at the Hellenic Open University in the postgraduate programme “Studies in Orthodox Theology.” She has authored educational material for distance learning and has supervised more than fifty postgraduate dissertations. She is the author of books and articles in academic journals, as well as chapters in edited volumes, and has also served as editor of books. Since 2023, she has been President of the Greek Section of the European Society of Women in Theological Research and is a member of several other academic associations and societies.

Research Interests: Social and political theology; religion, ideology and nationalism in Greece; Orthodox theology and the public sphere; religion, gender and sexuality; women’s religious organizations and social action; religions, democracy and human rights; theology, literature and culture; religious discourse in art and the public sphere; religious education; contemporary critical approaches to the study of religion.