Panagiotis Roilos’ publications and research interests center upon cultural politics, comparative poetics, historical and cognitive anthropology of Greek culture, reception studies. He is the author of the books C. P. Cavafy: The Economics of Metonymy (2009; Greek edition 2016), Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel (2005), and Towards a Ritual Poetics (2003; co-author with D. Yatromanolakis; Greek edition of the book, trans. Manos Skouras and with a preface by Marcel Detienne entitled "For an Anthropological Approach," 2005; Italian edition with a Preface by Marcel Detienne, entitled Per un approccio antropologico., trans. Chiara Rizzelli Martella, 2014).

His major publications also include the books Greek Ritual Poetics (co-editor; 2005),  Imagination and Logos: Essays on C.P. Cavafy (editor; 2010), and Medieval Greek Storytelling: Fictionality and Narrative in Byzantium (editor; 2014). He is currently completing a book entitled Neomedieval Postcapitalism.

In collaboration with Dimitrios Yatromanolakis he has produced the expanded and revised English (2002) and the revised Greek edition (2002) of Margaret Alexiou's The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (1974). He has conducted extensive fieldwork on oral traditional literature in South Italy as well as in Crete and the Peloponnese.

His current book-length projects include Abducting Athena: The Nazis and the Greeks and Byzantine Imaginaries: A Cognitive Anthropology of Medieval Greek Phantasia. 

Professor Roilos has co-founded and co-edited Cultural Politics, Socioaesthetics, Beginnings and Harvard Early Modern and Modern Greek Library. He has been a Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks (spring 2009) and has been awarded a Forschungsstipendium für erfahrene Wissenschaftler from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2010). Professor Roilos is also a member of the Steering Committee on Folklore and Mythology, of the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies, and of the Committee on Freshman Seminars.

He is the chair of the Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on Modern Greek Literature and Culture.  He is a Faculty Associate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA). He is the co-founder and co-chair of the Research Seminar “Cultural Politics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” at WCFIA.