Ph.D. student profiles at-risk Kurdish exile museum for The Markaz Review
Nasim T. Stone, a doctoral student in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, has published a new feature in The Markaz Review profiling the Kurdish Exile Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, and the uncertain future of its irreplaceable archive.
The article, “Exhibition Exile—a Profile of the Kurdish Exile Museum,” traces the four-decade project of Goran Candan, who founded a Kurdish publishing house in Stockholm in 1987 before converting it into the Foundation for the Kurdish Library and Museum. Candan's collection, roughly seven tons of books, artifacts, recordings, and other cultural materials, has helped institutions such as the Library of Congress and Harvard University's Widener Library build Kurdish collections. Stone reports that the museum lost its longtime Stockholm lease in 2025 and that Candan received little support from Kurdish political organizations in relocating an archive that, in some cases, may hold the only surviving copies of certain Kurdish cultural materials.
Drawing on interviews with Candan, Stone situates the museum's precarious future within a broader history of erasure and assimilation faced by Kurds across the region, and within the hope that has fueled decades of cultural preservation work in the diaspora.
Stone is completing her Ph.D. coursework with a focus on Kurdistan, Kurdish language, literature, and folklore, and her research centers on Kurdish folk belief and material culture. A translator, she has a co-translated book, Hero of the Kurdistan Republic: Memoir of a Revolutionary Captain, forthcoming from McFarland Publishers in early 2027.