Assistant Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature
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The Compulsory Exchange of Populations signed by Greece and Turkey in 1923 was the first mutual forced population exchange in modern history, uprooting almost two million people on the basis of their religion: Greece's Muslims were deported en masse to Turkey, while Turkey's Greek Orthodox Christians were uprooted and dumped into Greece. Since then, institutional partitions have been carving up the Aegean—between two nation states; between two languages and alphabets; between two continents and indeed two “civilizations.”
My forthcoming book, Literature's Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape (Princeton University Press), walks readers through a mostly uncharted geography of refugee and diasporic literatures hiding in the chinks and crannies between Christianity and Islam, between Europe and the Middle East, pushed off the grid a century ago by the Ottoman Empire 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: refugee and diasporic literatures whose crossings have been forced underground by cultural institutions on both sides of the border. My case studies range from Arabic-script Greek (written by Greek-speaking Muslims uprooted from Greece) to Greek-script Turkish (written by Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians uprooted from Turkey), from "highbrow" literature to the "lowbrow" ballads of handwritten commonplace books and reader marginalia.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Ergon, Book History, PMLA and elsewhere.
I would be delighted to work with graduate students interested in any facet of Greek or Turkish literature, Book History, Textual Criticism and Bibliography, Mediterranean Studies, Partitions and Border-Crossing, or Classical Reception in the modern Mediterranean.
