ZUZANNA OLSZEWSKA  Associate Professor, University of Oxford

 

Zuzanna is Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of the Middle East at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, and Tutorial Fellow in Archaeology and Anthropology at St. John’s College. She specialises in the ethnography of Iran and Afghanistan, with a focus on Afghan refugees in Iran, the Persian-speaking Afghan diaspora, and the anthropology of literature and cultural production. She is the author of The Pearl of Dari: Poetry and Personhood among Young Afghans in Iran (Indiana University Press, 2015), an ethnographic inquiry into how poetic activity reflects changes in youth subjectivity in an Afghan refugee community, based on fieldwork with an Afghan cultural organisation in Mashhad, Iran.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, due to the disillusionment with military force many have felt due to the terrible atrocities of the past four decades, most Dari-speaking Afghan poets are now resolutely opposed to war. My presentation will show how they use classical forms as well as modernist blank verse to speak of the many negative effects on victims of warfare and exile, and also describe their activism in multiethnic movements that help to imagine alternative futures for Afghanistan.