This project has created a series of network visualizations to trace connections between Anglophone LGBTQ+ exile writers from 1900 to 1969 during a historical period when queer people endured enforced movement away from the United States and the United Kingdom. Between 1900 and 1969, US and British writers, including canonical figures such as Gertrude Stein, Christopher Isherwood, James Baldwin, and Paul Bowles, relocated from their native environments to continental Europe and North Africa, principally Capri, Paris, Berlin, and Tangier. By resettling, these writers helped to establish a widespread LGBTQ+ exile literary network. The visualizations on this site demonstrate the complex webs of attachment that existed between these writers. They capture both their movements and creative exchanges across borders.

These visualizations are based on data from published journals, memoirs, and letter collections, as well as selected unpublished correspondence from archival collections, of a range of LGBTQ+ exile writers (see Sources below).

Benjamin Robbins, PhD is a senior postdoctoral researcher in American literary and cultural studies within the Department for American Studies at the University of Innsbruck and project leader of “Networked Narratives: Queer Exile Literature 1900-1969,” which is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He is the author of Faulkner's Hollywood Novels: Women between Page and Screen (University of Virginia Press 2024) and co-editor of a special issue of the journal AmLit on “Queer Ruralisms” (2024). Robbins’ work in the research areas of gender and queer studies, transnational literature and culture, and modernism has appeared in the journals Genre, Amerikastudien/American Studies, and the Faulkner Journal as well as in the edited collections Flyover Fictions (U of Nebraska P 2025) and Hipster Culture (Bloomsbury 2021). He is a senior collaborating editor for Digital Yoknapatawpha, a project based at the University of Virginia that has created network visualizations, interactive maps, and timelines for William Faulkner’s fictions. His work within the digital humanities has been published in Studies in American Culture (which received the Jerome Stern Award) and Digitizing Faulkner (U of Virginia P 2022). He has been a visiting research fellow at the EHESS in Paris, the Huntington Library in California, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

This publication is—unless otherwise noted—licensed under the terms of the international Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. This license permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided that you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. // Die vorliegende Publikation ist – wo nicht anders festgehalten – gemäß den Bedingungen der internationalen Creative-Commons-Lizenz Namensnennung 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) lizenziert, die die Nutzung, gemeinsame Nutzung, Anpassung, Verbreitung und Vervielfältigung in jedem Medium oder Format erlaubt, solange Sie den:die ursprüngliche:n Autor:in bzw. die ursprünglichen Autor:innen und die Quelle in angemessener Weise anführen, einen Link zur Creative-Commons-Lizenz setzen und etwaige Änderungen angeben.

Images or other third-party material in this publication are covered by the publication’s Creative Commons license, unless otherwise indicated in a credit line for the material. // Die Bilder oder anderes Material Dritter in der vorliegenden Publikation sind durch die Creative-Commons-Lizenz der Publikation abgedeckt, sofern in einem Verweis auf das Material nichts anderes angegeben ist.

This digital publication is published with the support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): 10.55777/PUD40
Research results from: 10.55777/PUD40 (“Networks of Anglophone LGBTQ+ Exile Writers from 1900 to 1969”) and 10.55776/P35199 (“Networked Narratives: Queer Exile Literature 1900–69”).

Previous funding has been provided by the Digital Humanities Research Center at the University of Innsbruck—within the scope of their DI4DH (“Digitization and Information Extraction for the Digital Humanities”) program funded through the Austrian Federal Ministry for Science, Research, and the Economy—the Digital Media budget of the University of Innsbruck’s Faculty of Language, Literature, and Culture, and the State of Vorarlberg (Amt der Vorarlberger Landesregierung), as part of their program to support academic work with a connection to Vorarlberg.

Assistance in the conceptualization and design of the project database has been provided by Worthy Martin (Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia, United States) and Simon Siegert (IT-Systems Engineer, Potsdam, Germany). The visualizations website was designed by Siegert and Loris Mat (Data Visualization Designer, Montpellier, France). The data entry and review was completed by Benjamin Robbins, Pius Hartmann, Beatrice Ubbiali, and Johanna Unterholzner (University of Innsbruck).