Semele Assinder is a specialist in Modern Greek literature and the history of women's writing, as well as a tutor for the Undergraduate Diploma in English at the Institute of Continuing Education. She studied Classics at the University of Oxford, before coming to Cambridge to work on her doctorate, Greece in British Women's Writing, 1866-1915. During her PhD she worked in Athens while holding an Onassis Foreigner's Fellowship; upon completion she took up the British School at Athens's Macmillan Rodewald Studentship. She has lectured in the past for the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge, and she currently teaches Classics and Modern Greek at a secondary school in the Midlands.

Her teaching method is coloured by the idea that literature cannot be studied in a vacuum. In seeking to bring texts and contexts into conversation, then, her classes rely on historically-informed discussion and a sound understanding of extra-literary materials, from photographs to cinema.

She is currently completing a book about the forgotten travel writer, Elizabeth Edmonds, and is co-editing a collection of essays entitled Greece in British Women's Literary Imagination, 1913-2013.