William Stroebel

My book, Literature's Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape (Princeton University Press), walks readers through an uncharted geography of refugee and diasporic literatures hiding in the chinks and crannies between Europe and the Middle East, pushed off the grid a century ago by the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange (1923-1925) and the modern border logic that it set in motion. From the status quo of this border regime, which marked the edges of Europe and West Asia, my book pries open a place for the displaced and a refuge for their literatures. My case studies range from Arabic-script Greek (written by Greek-speaking Muslims uprooted from Greece) to Karamanli Turkish (Turkish written in the Greek script by Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians uprooted from Turkey), from "highbrow" literature to the "lowbrow" ballads of handwritten commonplace books and reader marginalia.

Personal Webpage

Research Interests: Modern Greek Literature, Turkish Literature, Book History, Mediterranean Studies, Classical Reception, Materialism, Histories of the International Left

Publications

Peer-reviewed articles

• “Contingent Ruins in Leylâ Erbil's Remnant." Diacritics 52/3 (2025).
  
  
• “Borders, Belonging, and Refugee Memory since the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange." Co-authored with Kristina Gedgaudaitė. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 40/2 (2022).
  
  
• “Longhand Lines of Flight: Cataloging Displacement in a Karamanli Refugee’s Commonplace Book.” PMLA vol. 136 no. 2 (2021).
  
  
• “The Greek Vampire Goes East: Vampirism, Irredentism, and Language Politics in a Karamanli-Turkish Translation of Aristotelis Valaoritis’ ‘Thanasis Vayas.’” The Sources of Oriental Languages and Literatures no. 150, vol. 1 (2021).
  
  
• “Some Assembly Required: Suspending and Extending the Book with Cavafy’s Collections.” Book History vol. 21 (2018).
  
  
• “The Hyphenated Hyphen: Turkish-in-the-Greek-Script American Literature.” Ergon 2018.
  
  
• “Distancing Disaster: Trauma, Medium, and Form in the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32/2 (2014).

Special Issues

1922-2022: A Century of Border Making and Refugeehood. Special Issue of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies (October 2022), edited by Kristina Gedgaudaitė and William Stroebel.

William Stroebel is assistant professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature.