Literature's Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape by William Stroebel has been published by Princeton University Press (March 2025).
According to Professor Stroebel, “My book walks readers through a mostly 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, the 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. The 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.
You can read Professor Stroebel’s first interview (in Greek) on the book in News 24/7: The Magazine, “WILL STROEBEL: ΕΝΑΣ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΣ ΓΚΡΕΜΙΖΕΙ ΣΥΝΟΡΑ.”
Will Stroebel is Assistant Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.
