Living Between Libraries

When I tell people I’m a scholar, they may picture a cozy corner office filled with books, a reliable coffee maker and a well-worn if slightly uncomfortable desk chair that knows the shape of my scholarly ambitions. The reality? My academic life fits into two suitcases and a laptop bag, my belongings carefully curated through years of moving between academic positions across three continents. The most expensive item in my luggage isn’t my laptop—it’s the external hard drive containing seven years of my research data and short stories. My nomadic existence has led me to hold on to nothing, even as I live the scholarly life of which I’ve always dreamed.

My journey began with what seemed like a simple move from UCLA to NYU. I remember standing in my Los Angeles apartment surrounded by shelves weighed down by my literary anchors—Haruki Murakami, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Michel Foucault, Ahmet Altan—a collection that represented more than just childish hopes that I would one day be another name on another young aspiring academic’s bookshelf. As you see, for a Kurdish American young woman, these stories carved out literary landscapes where I could imagine a more stable existence. I found myself making impossible decisions about which theoretical texts would make the cross-country journey. Lefebvre or Barthes? Both felt essential. (Note to self: I should have chosen based on weight rather than theoretical importance—digital copies work just fine for most purposes.)

The true transformation came during my Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Edinburgh, as well as the periodic research stays in Istanbul that felt both surreal and inevitable as the foundation of my research on the representation of Istanbul in literary cityscapes. I discovered that the perpetual motion of academic life demands more than efficient packing and tearful goodbyes to paperbacks now collecting dust in my childhood bedroom. It requires reimagining the very concept of home. “Home” for me transformed into the familiar rhythm of my keyboard in unfamiliar places, the comfort of my meticulously organized digital files and the ability to create a workspace in any cafe within 15 minutes—even as my California accent and well-worn Keds marked me as an outsider who saved every pound for the double-chocolate muffins that fueled my writing.

My first week in Edinburgh brought such a harsh reality into focus. Standing in a hastily furnished flat in Leith, watching debris drift along the canal that reminded me of younger days hitchhiking through Europe and the Middle East, I surveyed the books I’d shipped across the Atlantic at considerable expense—£347 (about $438), which could have bought months of digital access. The realization that I’d need to move again in less than a year hit me with crushing force: In academia, permanence is a luxury reserved for the established few.

My temporary homes have etched themselves into my being, each space a chapter in my academic odyssey. My second-floor apartment in Leith became my first true Scottish sanctuary, its large windows framing the timeless dance of the sunlight along the Water of Leith. I would spend hours at my cheap, Amazon-ordered desk watching the canal’s waters shift from slate to silver, the constant motion mirroring my own academic journey. The old radiators clinked and protested through winter nights, their irregular rhythms becoming a strange lullaby as I worked through draft after draft of my dissertation. That flat, with its stained carpeting and temperamental plumbing, taught me how to create warmth beyond the physical, through late-night writing sessions fueled by Turkish coffee and the gentle glow of my laptop screen.

A shared flat near the shores in the Edinburgh suburb of Portobello later became my intellectual haven, where midnight discussions about methodology with fellow researchers over Aldi-purchased sandwiches and just-born ideas transformed into lifelong friendships and future collaborations. The sublet near Taksim Square in Istanbul introduced me to Nilüfer, an elderly neighbor who would appear at my door with plates of the building’s new gossip and stern pronouncements about the importance of marrying my studies with a life well-lived—her wisdom, wrapped in grandmotherly concern, offered a kind of hospitality I hadn’t known I was missing. In another corner of the city, the humble room tucked away amongst Zeytinburnu’s auto repair shops became an unexpected safe space; while the mechanics’ hammers created an industrial symphony below, I found myself choosing the solitude of my research over the vibrant pull of Istanbul’s nightlife, learning that sometimes the most profound adventures happen in the quiet spaces between paragraphs.

As I adapted, my relationship with books—those physical attachments of academic identity—underwent an unexpected transformation. My personal library shrank to 23 carefully chosen volumes, each earning its weight in my luggage through irreplaceability. My collection of novels by Turkish writers Elif Shafak, Orhan Pamuk, Ahmet Ümit and Burhan Sönmez was something I could not let go of: These writers’ literary songs about Istanbul were, after all, part of the whole reason why I chose this imperfect academic life. And if by any chance I am to find a permanent home somewhere, one day, it would surely be there in Istanbul, tucked between the cafes and galleries lining Cihangir, or perhaps within one of those colorful homes in Balat where the call to prayer echoes through even the fiercest of chaos.

I also became a connoisseur of academic spaces, learning which coffee shops offered not just Wi-Fi and power outlets, but a sense of belonging for a long-term visitor. The Elephant House in Edinburgh may have had J. K. Rowling’s ghost, but the real magic happened in Bruntsfield’s cafes, where baristas would try oh so hard to pronounce my difficult Turkish name correctly, and fellow nomads shared knowing “someone send help” looks over our laptop screens.

The deepest challenge wasn’t logistical but existential, a truth that came about during my long hours shared with fellow doctoral students in the Ph.D. study room at 50 George Square. When your institutional affiliation changes with the seasons, your academic identity requires constant reconstruction. But in that study room, with its worn carpet and perpetually fogged windows overlooking Edinburgh’s gothic spires, we found solidarity in our shared liminality. I watched as each term brought new faces and empty desks where friends once sat, their absence marked by phantom keyboard taps and half-remembered conversations about Derrida over midday cups of steaming tea topped off with cold, flat milk.

You learn, in spaces like these, to introduce yourself through your ideas rather than your temporary institutional home, to find stability in your research questions rather than your physical address. The study room taught me that academic belonging isn’t found in a fixed address but in the intellectual conversations that float between the bookshelves, in the knowing nods exchanged over shared struggles, in the collective sighs of relief when someone brings goodies during the annual review season. We created our own geography of belonging through shared celebrations of each small victory—another chapter drafted, another abstract accepted, another conference presentation completed, each piece of the scholarly puzzle, one by one, clicked into place. These moments, more than any institutional letterhead, became the true markers of my academic identity.

The most profound lesson of this journey has been that home in academia isn’t a place—it’s a practice. It’s found in the familiar cadence of typing in a new library, the warm recognition at overseas conferences and the steady guidance of research questions through unfamiliar territories. It’s sharing a table in whichever library is the warmest with other nomadic scholars, all of us temporarily rooted by our laptops and our shared pursuit of knowledge.

Now, as I open my laptop in yet another borrowed space, I find home in the familiarity of my work, in transcontinental Zoom conversations with colleagues and in the knowledge that this wandering leads to something greater than a traditional career path, even though I am not yet quite sure what that may be. It’s creating a global perspective that enriches both my research and my understanding of academic life itself.

For those embarking on this nomadic path, know that the challenges will come for you no matter how desperately you try to evade them. However, they are by no means insurmountable. Build your stability around your scholarly identity rather than your address. Find comfort in the transient and home in the spaces between libraries. Remember that this phase of constant movement often leads to more permanent shores; until then, embrace the unique perspective it provides. Some of my most valuable insights emerged from conversations in temporary offices, and my strongest professional bonds were forged in shared academic displacement.

The academic nomad’s life transcends survival between positions—it is about discovering beauty in the impermanent, meaning in the momentary. Each temporary desk becomes a gateway to possibility, each library card a key to new intellectual kingdoms. I’ve learned to read cities through their libraries: the hushed grandeur of the British Library’s reading rooms, the modernist efficiency of NYU’s Bobst, the intimate warmth of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections, where ancient manuscripts rest beneath gothic arches. Some nights, writing in yet another temporary office as lights flicker on across an unfamiliar city, I realize that this nomadic existence has taught me to find home in the margins of manuscripts, in the footnotes of forgotten texts, in the liminal spaces between established truths where new ideas take root. Perhaps the most transformative scholarship emerges not from those who have found a fixed academic address, but from those of us who have learned to carry our libraries in our laptops and our communities in our questions, who have discovered that intellectual belonging knows no geographical bounds. In a world where knowledge knows no borders, perhaps we nomadic scholars are the ones truly, perpetually, at home.