Aria Aber and Jamil Jan Kochai in conversation with Mehak Faizal Khan

This event will be held in-person and livestreamed on Zoom. Register to attend in person / Register to attend via Zoom

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Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance, launched by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Letters and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and housed at the Institute for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame.

Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and now lives in the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and graduate student at USC, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Raised speaking Farsi and German, she writes in her third language, English. She serves as the poetry editor of Amulet, as a contributing editor at The Yale Review, and works as an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Vermont. Aber divides her time between Vermont and Brooklyn.

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award and a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and 2023 Clark Fiction Prize. His debut novel 99 Nights in Logar was a finalist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and a winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Kochai was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but his family originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in English from California State University, Sacramento, his Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis, and his Master of Fine Arts at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The Sewanee Review, and A Public Space, and they have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and The Norton Introduction to Literature. His essays have been published at The New Yorker, Literary Hub, and the Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He teaches creative writing at Princeton University.

Mehak F. Khan is Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests span different modes of contemporary culture from the novel to social media. Her writing is forthcoming in Philological Encounters , Critical Pakistan Studies, and other venues. Dr. Khan holds a Ph.D in English with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in English with a minor in Game Design from New York University. Professor Khan’s current research is on theories and modes of strangeness that coalesce around the concept of “ajeeb” aesthetics – a framework that folds in affect theory, queer theory, and aesthetic theory. Other projects include an exploration of questions of state failure and game logics. She writes fiction and nonfiction, and is a founding editor of Tasavvur, a magazine for speculative South Asian fiction.

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Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.

This event is sponsored by Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Creative Writing Program, Department of English, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, The Graduate School, Department of American Studies, Institute for Social Concerns, Teaching Beyond the Classroom Grants, The Brookline Booksmith Transnational Literature Series and the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good/Henkels Grant.