William Stroebel introduces Jonathan Conlin to the stories Lausanne tried to silence, that combined scripts and vocabularies in ways that challenged philologists’ obsession with linguistic purity and authorial intent.

e-mail: stroebel@umich.edu

Will is Assistant Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.

In his recent book Literature’s Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape Will Stroebel focuses on the stories that the “checkpoints of modern philology” either sought to exclude or which were permitted to pass only if they changed their clothes, accent and backstory to fit a national norm. Although Will’s book points to examples from the preceding centuries, Lausanne and the population exchange dramatically ramped up this regime through their attempted “unmixing” of the peoples of the Near and Middle East, displaced into territories whose schools, critics and publishers sought to “purify” these refugees’ vocabulary and literature of “corrupt”, “barbaric” or supposedly “non-existent” words and accents. An Ottoman space and an Ottoman scriptworld, in which different faith communities used the same script to write in different languages, became a “universe of the in-between”, “a linguistic no-man’s land.” In this conversation, recorded on 8 September 2025, Will explains how he came to study this topic, before addressing the analogies between two testimonies of the events around Lausanne: Halide Edib’s Shirt of Flame and Stratis Doukas’ Captive’s Story. He then introduces Agathangelos, a Greek cleric from the Anatolian village of Andaval (near Niğde in today’s Republic of Turkey), whose manuscript novels and commonplace book joined displaced Ottoman Greeks in Wisconsin, where they circulated among a Karamanli diaspora. The podcast closes with Jon challenging Will on his optimistic call to his readers to train themselves “to cross alphabets, languages, and confessions, mixing our own scripts into the scripts we encounter.” In a world of AI and monoglottism, how realistic is this vision?

For Will’s PMLA article about the commonplace book discussed in this podcast, click here (or, for those without online access to this journal, click here for an open-access draft). To get a discount on his book, please use the discount code P327 at check out from Princeton University Press’s online bookshop.

The philologist’s job ought not to be to single out and canonize any single voice but to recover the trace of each within and beyond the page, to recover likewise the spaces of collaboration and struggle that play out as the text evolves and changes…My aim is not to critique in any absolute sense the testimonial and the very real historical truths that it articulates; instead, I want to better curate them.
William Stroebel, “Literature’s Refuge”, p. 162.

Episode 72 – The Universe of the In-Between

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.