Meet Bryar Bajalan, AUIS graduate (2018) and primary investigator at Kashkul, AUIS’s center for arts and culture. Bryar is currently pursuing an MA in Middle East Studies at the UK’s University of Exeter and is a recipient of the Al Qasimi Masters Excellence Scholarship. His research will explore how romantic and erotic themes in poetry from Mosul has affected the ways in which people talk about intimate encounters.
Bryar is a researcher, translator, and filmmaker. His documentary ‘To the Ends of the Earth,’ focused on nineteenth-century Baghdad poet Jamil al-Zahawi and premiered at the Translating Poetries Symposium in London in 2019. His translation work in Arabic and Kurdish has appeared in Ambit, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, and on the Poetry Foundation website. His current projects also include translation of poets displaced from Sinjar during the Islamic State’s attack on northern Iraq and a collection of oral histories in Mosul.