The “Global Village” and Exile Experience in Contemporary Diasporic Writing: Kurdish, Hindi, Balochi, Persian and Urdu Writing beyond Borders

International conference at Uppsala University, February 4–6, 2027

Venue: Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, Sweden
Dates: February 4–6, 2027

The conference will be an open forum for diasporic authors and scholars. It plans to explore how contemporary authors represent exile, migration, and belonging in an age of global communication and accelerated mobility in exile/diaspora literature of the mentioned languages. The conference will be held in person in Uppsala. Digital participation will not be made available. The conference language will be English. As a side event of the conference, there will be a public reading and discussion of literature written by the participants in collaboration with the Swedish magazine “Karavan”.

Organizers:

Hashem Ahmadzadeh, Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University
Carina Jahani, Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University
Heinz Werner Wessler, Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University

Please submit your abstract of 150–200 words before September 30, 2026, to exlit@lingfil.uu.se.
Notification before November 30, 2026.

Conference language: English.

The topics of the presentations can include:

exile between cosmopolitanism and nationalism
postcolonial and transnational identities
multilingualism, linguistic displacement and language change
refugee narratives and forced migration
digital diasporas and online literary publics
nostalgia, memory, and the reconstruction of “home”
hybrid literary forms and global readerships

Invited speakers:

Widad Akreyi, President and co-founder of Defend International, Denmark
Madeline Clements, Senior lecturer, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK
Shahzaman Haque, Professor, INALCO, Paris, France
Agri Ismail, Kurdish novelist and essayist, Stockholm, Sweden
Richa Jain, Hindi author, London, UK
Persis Karim, Professor Emerita of Comparative and World Literature and Director Emerita, Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies, San Francisco State University, USA
Kausar Bushra Malik, Urdu author, Bonn, Germany
Divya Mathur, Hindi author, London, UK
Tejendra Sharma, Hindi author and editor, London, UK
Burhan Sönmez, Kurdish author, President of PEN International, London, UK
Khanna Usoyan Omarkhali, Kurdish researcher and author, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

as well as a number of Baloch authors based in different countries.

Conference website:
https://www.uu.se/en/department/linguistics-and-philology/research/events/exile-literature

Conference e-mail address: exlit@lingfil.uu.se