Narratives of Exile and Migration from the Middle Ages to the Present

Fin août 2025

Dre Juliette Vuille, anglais médiéval, UNIL ; Dr Matthew Scully anglais américain, UNIL

Dre Shannon Derby, Emerson College ; Pre Stacy S. Klein, Rutgers University

Exile and migration have been urgent concerns during the religious and geo-political conflicts that have taken place from the Middle Ages to the present day. Across this long history, literary production has sought to interrogate, intervene in, and re-imagine such matters. These literary representations have also often taken advantage of cross-temporal possibilities: the use of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a formal model for retelling UK asylum-seekers' experiences or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's turn to Joan of Arc and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux as models for her reflections on gender, home, and migration in Dictee (1982), to name just two examples.detail detailIn this way, literary representations of exile and migration often reflect their own socio-political contexts while also insisting on the enduring concerns of these topics. Perhaps paradoxically, given their fraught implications, exile and migration are therefore unifying topics, which influence the research of many CUSO doctoral students, especially those working on literature produced in English, the language of global citizenship. Switzerland, as a place where many voluntary and involuntary exiles found refuge, as well as a site with a complex history of migration, offers an ideal context in which to engage these topics.

This CUSO workshop proposes to take advantage of these common concerns to permit doctoral students to reflect together on the connections and disconnections between literary representations of exile and migration, along with other related issues and topics, from the medieval period to the contemporary. In order to foster community-building amongst the doctoral students, this will be a residential workshop in the Chalet des Capucines, in Les Diablerets. They will be joined there over two days and nights by two invited experts, Dr. Shannon Derby (Emerson College) and Prof. Stacy S. Klein (Rutgers University), who will each offer a guest lecture on the topic as well as a two-hour workshop on texts that the participants will have read beforehand. Dr. Derby specializes in global anglophone travel writing and postcolonial literature with a particular focus on questions of gender, colonialism, migration, exile, and refuge in the context of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Prof. Klein is an Anglo-Saxonist whose expertise notably lies in intersections of gender and exile poetry, the maritime world of the Anglo-Saxons, and the effects of warfare and large-scale violence on gender in the pre-Conquest period. Both speakers' insightful research and pedagogical commitments position them as ideal interlocutors for this CUSO event.

In addition to the lectures and workshops, all doctoral students will have the opportunity to present their research over the first two days of the event. The workshop will be rounded off by a third day consisting of an optional hike up to the Refuge de Pierredar. This voluntary activity will provide an alternative mode and space for engaging each other in the topics under discussion throughout the weekend. The Chalet des Capucines does not offer catering, and therefore the doctoral students will be asked to help the organisers cook some simple meals, fostering a spirit of sharing and exchange among the doctoral cohort which will be invaluable throughout their doctoral studies.

Potential topics

This workshop will focus on exile and migration in their broader sense, as they may relate to gender, politics, religion, conflict, racism, ecology, etc.

· Old English literature of exile, Old English elegies, Exodus, etc.

· Middle English literature: quest narratives, exile from beloved, amour de lonh, narratives of religious travels/pilgrimage, anchoritism, eremitism, wild men, etc.

· Religious exile from society (eremitism, mysticism), life as exile from God, Adam and Eve and fallen angel's exile from God.

· Romanticism, isolation and loneliness in romantic poetry, expression through alienating geography and individualism as marginalisation from society.

· Switzerland and its mountains as exile and refuge from society in English accounts of the Grand Tour

· Travel writing

· Modernism: writing of and about exile, refuge by ex-patriates (e.g., Anglo-Americans in Europe/Switzerland)

· Contemporary: globalization and figures of exile/refuge (e.g., Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee); literary-philosophical investigations (e.g., J.M. Coetzee's Jesus Trilogy)

· Narratives of migration and questions of genre

· Medievalism and use of medieval exile/refuge tropes in contemporary activism and writing (e.g., Lauren Groff's Matrix)

· Eco-critical aspect; cli-fi; eco-fiction, "Oceanic" humanities

· Linguistics: the language of exile, refuge, and belonging: dialects, global English, etc.

[1] For the former example, see David Herd and Anna Pincus (eds), Refugee Tales, 4 vols (London: Comma Press, 2016-2021). For audio-visual retellings of these tales by their authors, see 28for28.org.

Chalet les Capucines (Chalet des sport UNIL), Les Diablerets

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