About the lecture

The Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923-1925, which uprooted and swapped nearly two million Christians and Muslims between Southeast Europe and West Asia, was formative to Modern Greek identity. 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, 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.

About the speaker

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.

Together with his partner, Giota Tachtara, he is raising two children.