Assistant Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature
About
Primary Languages: Greek and Turkish
Affiliations: Classical Studies, Modern Greek
Teaching interests: Our world is defined by borders. Linguistic, cultural, and political containment systems cut through us and shape our sense of self and belonging. We carry them inside of us and reproduce them, through acts as simple as signing a passport, writing an essay in a standard dialect, or filling out an I-9 Form. What precisely are borders made of? How are they maintained, moved, or crossed? My teaching focuses on borders, migration and mobility, from the movement of people to the movement of books, languages and ideas, which leads me to teaching in fields like book history, translation studies, and classical reception.
Recent courses: The Border Crossed Us
(GREEKMOD 360); A Sea of Odysseys (COMPLIT 140); Translation and Migration (COMPLIT 322); Book History (COMPLIT 770).
Research interests: 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 at the East-West 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 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange 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.
Publications:
Peer-reviewed articles
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.
Translations
- Kosmas Çekmezoğlu. “The Ballad of Kosmas Tsekmezoglou” [Karamanli Turkish to English]. Karamanlidika Legacies. Edited by Evagelia Balta, Isis Publishers, 2018, pp. 209-228.
- Christos Chrysopoulos. “A Light in the Mouth” [Greek to English]. Absinthe vol. 21, 2014, pp. 15-29
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.
