Literature’s Refuge and Modern Border Regime: A Book Talk with William Stroebel

April 24, 2026, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

CUNY Graduate Center, Room C198

The modern Middle East was born a century ago, when the Ottoman Empire was carved up into racialized borders. The Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923–1925 was the final nail in the empire's coffin, uprooting and swapping nearly two million Christians and Muslims between Europe and West Asia. What stories can we salvage from this devastating history, and how can we retell them today?

The answer depends in large part on what we count as stories, who gets to record them, and how we curate them within the academy and commercial publishing. In both Greece and Turkey, philologists and publishers defined modern literature by picking apart, extracting, reformatting, or dispossessing refugee and diasporic texts across a racialized borderscape—a gray zone of semi-inclusion and semi-exclusion. Drawing from his book Literature’s Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape, William Stroebel will recover something of the rich refugee literatures that fell through the cracks of the modern border regime, straddling Greek Orthodoxy and Sunni Islam, Greek-script, Arabic-script, and Latin-script literary traditions.

William Stroebel teaches Modern Greek and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. His research straddles Book History, Border Studies, Mediterranean Studies, Modern Greek and Turkish Literature, and Classical Reception. His book, Literature’s Refuge, was published in 2025 by Princeton University Press as part of the Translation-Transnation series.

This event is free and open to the public. It is organized by the CUNY Graduate Center PhD Programs in French and Comparative Literature Program and cosponsored by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.