Out of Place: Forced Migration in Literature and Political Theory

Yasemin Sari is an assistant professor of philosophy at Seattle University. Her work focuses on the relationship between human rights, recognition, and equality, and investigates the questions of political agency through belonging in a democracy.

Fatima Festić has worked as a Visiting Professor, Lecturer and Researcher across the Humanities in Eastern and Western Europe, USA, South Africa, Turkey, and published books and articles in literary and critical theory, (post)conflict, gender and trauma studies; forthcoming is a monograph on Body, Mediality, History. Currently at the University of Amsterdam (ARTES), Festić is developing a theory of postdisporic sociocultural dispersion, writing the same-title monograph.

Arpita is a PhD scholar at the Department of English, University of Delhi where her research focuses on literatures of forced migration and displacement in a globalized world (with special focus on South Asia) and aspects of border crossing and camp spaces. In much of her research, she has critically engaged with theories of trauma, citizenship and displacement in Central and South Asia. Her other interest areas are global politics, human rights, children’s literature and memory.

Philipp Schweighauser is Professor of North American and General Literature at the University of Basel. He is the author of 50+ essays and three monographs, most recently Boasian Verse: The Poetic and Ethnographic Work of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead (2023). He is currently working on a book on 21st c. Native American literature and directs the four-year research project "Anglo Genres for Atlantic Futures: Contemporary Eco-Fictions, Campus Novels, and Science Fictions."

Federica Franzè is a Senior Lecturer in Italian at Columbia University and one of the Directors of the language program. She has a Ph.D. in literature from Rutgers University, and a master’s degree in Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies from the University of London. She is actively engaged in refugee and immigrant issues, volunteering in Italy and New York. Her research interests include cinema and literature of migration, foreign language pedagogy, integration projects for refugees

Raihan Rahman (Legal name: S A M Raihanur Rahman) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of English in the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His areas of interest include Marxian theory, environmental humanities, postcolonial and decolonial studies, global anglophone fiction, and Bengali literature. Currently, Raihan’s research focuses on politics in and of the Anthropocene. A writer and translator, he works both in Bengali and English.

Nisha Kommattam works at the intersection of South Asian literatures and Gender & Sexuality studies, with a focus on Southern India (Malayalam Literature, Kerala Studies). She is also interested in literatures of migration, inter-Asia comparisons, popular culture, and in the transnational entanglements of German writers in fin-de-siècle Europe. She also translates poetry, fiction and non-fiction from Malayalam to English and German, and from German to English. 

Arnav Sibal is a first-year Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan. He works on migration and spaces of transit, global anglophone, and representations of war and violence. His research concerns nineteenth and twentieth century figurations of the migrant and how, during a time of intensified and varied mobility, they enabled conceptions of the foreign and the native.

Florian Grosser is Lecturer in the Arts & Humanities Collegiate Division at The University of Chicago. His research interests lie in contemporary political and social philosophy, with a focus on the relation between migration and democracy; in the history of political thought; and in 20th century phenomenology and critical theory.

Monika Zaleska is a writer, translator, and PhD candidate in comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College where she served as an editor of The Brooklyn Review and taught in the English department. She currently teaches Polish literature at Hunter College. 

Dr. Ana M. Luszczynska is an Associate Professor of English and Dean of SEAS at FIU.  Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial theory, phenomenology and deconstruction, and 20th and 21st century U.S. Latinx and African-American literatures.  She has published work in journals such as The New Centennial Review,  Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Postcolonial Text, and her monograph, The Ethics of Community, was published in 2012 with Bloomsbury Press.  

Jörg Kreienbrock is a Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. His research and teaching interests include German literature from the 18th to the 21st century with an emphasis on literary theory, poetry and poetics, and the history of science. 

Irene Kuo is Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Wake Forest University. She earned her Ph.D. in German Studies from Stanford University and her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Georgetown University. Her area of specialization is in 20th and 21st century German literature, with a focus on concepts of autobiographical authenticity and legal credibility in literary representations of forced migration. 

Nassima Sahraoui is a philosopher based in Germany. Her research focusses on political theory, history of philosophy, intersections between literature and philosophy, and epistemology. She has published several books and edited volumes, including Hannah Arend and Jacques Derrida: Writing between Politics, Poetics, and Philosophy (2025), Dynamis: Eine materialistische Philosophie der Differenz (2022), Heidegger in the Literary World: Variations of Poetic Thinking (2021), and New Benjamin Studies.