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

28-30 aout 2025

Matthew SCULLY

Dr. Juliette Vuille, UNIL

Dr. Matthew Scully, UNIL

Dr. Shannon Derby, Emerson College

Prof. 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 crosstemporal 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. In 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, 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 19th and early 20th 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. We evaluate at around ten the number of doctoral students presenting. The workshop will be rounded off by a third day consisting of an optional hike up to the high-mountain Refuge de Pierredar, standing as a reminder that these constructions are often life-saving spaces open to those who face the threat of cold, storms, and natural dangers when risking a perilous journey in the mountains. These high-mountain refuges echo the Old English elegiac poetry of exile, with its I-speakers expressing their awe of the cold and icy storms of a threatening nature, away from the protection of civilization. This will permit an alternative mode and space for engaging with each other in the topics under discussion throughout the workshop, as well as to foreground the role of nature, ecology, and climate change in patterns of exile and migration. The Chalet des Capucines does not offer catering, and therefore the doctoral students will be asked to help the organizers cook some simple meals, fostering a spirit of sharing and exchange among the doctoral cohort which will be invaluable throughout their doctoral

Les Diablerets

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