Kashmir-Palestine Conversation Series 4 | Dalia Taha, Ather Zia & Nadine El-Enany | Jan 2023

The fourth episode in the Kashmir Palestine Conversation Series addresses “Poetry and literature” and feature short presentations from Dalia Taha (poet and playwright) and Ather Zia (poet and writer, University of Colorado). The chair is Nadine El-Enany (Birkbeck, University of London) About the speakers Dalia Taha is a Palestinian poet and playwright living in Ramallah. Her first play Keffiyeh/Made in China was produced by the Flemish Royal Theatre and A.M. Qattan Foundation and premiered in Brussels. Her play Al’ab Nariya/Fireworks was developed under the Royal Court’s International Playwriting residency and was produced there (London) in 2015. Dalia graduated from Brown University with an MFA in Playwriting and has published two collections of poetry and one novel. She recently completed her third play There Is No One Between You and Me. Ather Zia is a political anthropologist, poet and short-fiction writer. She is an assistant professor of anthropology and gender studies at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (June 2019) and co-editor of Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (UPenn 2018) and A Desolation called Peace (Harper Collins, May 2019). She has published a poetry collection The Frame (1999) and another collection is forthcoming. Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region. Ather is also the founder/editor of e-zine based on Kashmir titled Kashmir Lit at www.kashmirlit.org. Nadine El-Enany is a Reader in Law at Birkbeck School of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law (@CentreRaceLaw). Nadine teaches and researches in the fields of migration and refugee law, European Union law, protest and criminal justice. Her current research projects, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, focus on questions of race and justice in death in custody cases, and the role of law in addressing health inequalities arising from environmental harm. Nadine has written for the Guardian, the LRB Blog, Pluto Blog, Verso Blog, Open Democracy, Media Diversified, Left Foot Forward and Critical Legal Thinking. Her book, (B)ordering Britain: law, race and empire (2020) is published by Manchester University Press. The Kashmir-Palestine Conversations Series aims to create space for dialogue, networking and knowledge exchange between scholars of both Kashmir and Palestine. The series is organised by the Kashmir-Palestine Scholars Solidarity Network – an initiative conceived out of a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers Seed Grant awarded to scholars at the Council for British Research in the Levant (Dr Toufic Haddad) and the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) (Dr Emma Brännlund) in early 2020.