Assistant Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature
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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 Christianity and Islam, between Europe and the Middle East, pushed off the grid a century ago by the collapse of 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, Diacritics 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.
