Monday, February 1, 2021 - 11:15
Bryar Bajalan, Engineering '18
Meet Bryar Bajalan, Engineering ‘18 and primary investigator at Kashkul, AUIS’s center for arts and culture. Bryar holds a Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Studies with distinction from the University of Exeter and his dissertation titled, “‘I’m fed up with everything old I ‘ve ever known. / Only if you have something new then mention it’: The Emergence and Development of Modern Iraqi Poetry,” has received the University’s Glencairn Balfour-Paul Prize. This prize is awarded to the student presenting the best dissertation in an MA program in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies of the College of Social Sciences and International Studies.
Bryar is currently pursuing his PhD in Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter and is a recipient of Al-Qasimi PhD Studentship from the College of Social Sciences and International Studies. His research will explore how romantic and erotic themes in poetry from Mosul have 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 was premiered at the Translating Poetries Symposium at SOAS in London 2019 and won the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Tagore International Film Festival (TIFF) 2020. 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 include the translation of poets displaced from Shingal during the Islamic State’s genocide of the Êzîdî and a collection of oral histories in Mosul.