Centre for Kurdish Studies

Facilities

The Centre for Kurdish Studies benefits from Exeter’s large specialist library collections on the Middle East, and from the presence of AWDU (the Arab World Documentation Unit), which also contains many items of interest to Kurdish specialists – including, for example C J Edmonds’ personal maps of Iraq, with his annotations.

Thanks to the generosity of donors, we are also able to pursue our strategy of building up our collection of Kurdish and Kurdish-related titles. We have recently acquired almost all Kurdish titles published in Turkey over the past few years. This collection includes in particular contemporary literature, novels, poetry and short stories published in Kurmanji during the last 20 years.

In addition, we have also acquired a collection of over 700 titles from the former Soviet Union, which includes not only the principal works of the major Soviet Kurdish novelists, but also many scholarly books. Exeter now has the most extensive collection of Kurdish material from the former Soviet Union in a European university.