The second of two events in the series Remnants of the Iraq Wars: Iraqi Literature Twenty Years after 9/11.
Ever since the US-led invasion of Iraq, local and diaspora authors have been engaging with new aesthetics of corporeality.
In this seminar, Hanan Jasim Khammas, Visiting Doctoral Scholar at the CCL, will deliver a paper, followed by a discussion with respondents Ikram Masmoudi (University of Delaware) and Hanna Simpson (University of Oxford), to review aspects of corporeality in contemporary Iraqi fiction and to show how new representation of the body suggest a development in the perceptions of the body as a cultural sign.
The discussion will be chaired by Rita Sakr (Maynooth University).
Attendance is free but booking is essential to receive a link to attend. BOOKING IS NOW CLOSED
Watch a video of the seminar:
The participants:
Hanan Jasim Khammas, Visiting Doctoral Scholar at the CCL, is PhD candidate in literary theory and comparative literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, working on the representation of the body in contemporary Iraqi fiction. She is Adjunct Lecturer of Arabic and contemporary Arabic literature at UAB, on the Master in Contemporary Arabic Studies. She is a member of the research project Gender(s), Language(s) in Contemporary Arabness and Junior editor at Revista Banipal, the Spanish edition of Banipal.
Dr. Ikram Masmoudi is an Associate Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Delaware. Her research interests focus on contemporary Arabic and Iraqi literature especially post -2003 fiction of war, occupation and migration. Her recent publications include a monograph War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction (Edinburgh University Press), a translation of Hadiyya Hussein’s novel Beyond Love (Syracuse University Press), and she is currently working on a new book project about Apocalyptic Imagings in Arabic.
Dr. Hannah Simpson is the Rosemary Pountney Junior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. Her work focuses on politicised and affective representations of the human body in modern and contemporary literature, with a particular interest in depictions of physical pain and disability and in war literature. She has published extensively on Samuel Beckett’s writing in the joint Francophone and Irish contexts of World War II, on politicised representations of the body in twentieth-century Irish literature, and on the ongoing resonance of the ‘Troubles’ in contemporary Northern Irish literature. She has also co-edited special issues of Twentieth Century Literature, Medical Humanities, and The Journal of War and Culture Studies which focus on global cultural depictions of the non-combatant World War II body. She has two monographs forthcoming: Witnessing Pain: Samuel Beckett and Post-War Francophone Theatre (Oxford University Press) and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (Palgrave).
Dr. Rita Sakr is Lecturer in Postcolonial and Global Literatures and Director of the MA English: Literatures of Engagement at Maynooth University. She is the author of Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study and of ‘Anticipating’ the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies, co-editor of The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut, and co-director/co-producer of the RCUK-funded documentary on Beirut, White Flags. Her recent and forthcoming work on migrant and refugee cultural production is included in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture and a Cambridge UP volume on Diaspora and Literary Studies, among others. She is currently senior co-investigator on a mixed-methods research project that seeks to assess the psychosocial needs of first-generation Arabic-speaking adolescents in Ireland. She is co-founder of the Irish Network of Middle Eastern and North African Studies.
The first event in this series, Iraq: Corporeality & Memory. Iraqi literature, 20 years after 9/11 took place on 7 September 2021. Click on the even to see the video recording.