What We Do

Moving Fictions is a site dedicated to celebrating, researching and encouraging public discussions of modern literature about migration. All of the collaborators use fiction as a basis for different analyses of characters, themes, and contexts. Additionally, we seek to offer further resources to perpetuate research into the topics discussed. The texts we assemble here reflect larger stories about the difficult internal and external conflicts that accompany movement. In exploring the experiences of migrants, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, these fictions represent the complex realities of thousands of people who must relocate, rebuild, and recreate their lives. Through our work, we seek to present the stories of individuals, providing a detailed view of their lives while placing them within historically evolving contexts. We invite you to learn more about the phenomenon of migration on our Key Terms page.

Site History and Participants

This website was created in 2018 by a World Literature class at the University of Delaware. The class was invested and interested in the topic of migration and was then inspired to share their findings with the world. As time has gone on, subsequent classes have taken up this interest and dedication, building upon that knowledge as current events trends develop and literature rises up to reflect them. We hope this site sparks discussion about the experiences of displaced peoples and encourages you to engage with this topic.

A group of Honors students oversaw the website’s initial design process and was tasked with reviewing and editing the content published during the Fall 2018 semester. Those students were Alex Baker, Brynn Chieffo, Nicole Kushner, Rachel Milberg, and Shannon Murphy. 

The project continued with a group of honors students in the Spring 2019 semester. 

Theme updates .  .  . . . . .  .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Jessica Jenkins 

Addition of 19 new books to the site . .  . . . . . .Sydney Gualtieri and John Quigley

Addition of Key Terms section   . . .  .  . . Sydney Gualtieri and Gregory Zankowsky

The most recent contributors to the site are students in a World Literature course at the University of Delaware during the Fall 2019 semester. Their contribution acknowledgements can be found in the bottom corner of pages that they have created or edited. 

We are incredibly thankful for all of our wonderful contributors. We would first like to mention Hunter Southall; Hunter deserves enormous credit for developing a comprehensive style guide for the site. She has been integral in the foundation of the site and continues to provide technical support to students who are currently working on the site and investigate new formats to best display our information in accessible and understandable ways. 

We are also grateful for the expert guidance of University of Delaware librarians, especially Aimee Gee, the Literary Studies librarian, Nico Carver (now at Harvard’s Wolbach Library), Alex Galarza, digital scholarship librarian, and Amanda McCollom from the Student Multimedia Design Center. 

 

 

Professor Emily S. Davis taught the courses that initiated this project and is supervising ongoing work with the Moving Fictions project, including the most recent ENGL376 world literature course contributors. 

Each page of the site lists the student author at the bottom; this credit area also includes editors of the pages. 

 

 

Contact Us!

We continue to add in-depth material on new texts to the site, and we are also happy to add texts to our Similar Reads page. To recommend a text, offer feedback on our site, or ask questions about our content, please feel free to reach out to us at movingfictionsud@gmail.com.