Bringing together experts working at the intersection of literature, human rights, foreign policy and peace initiatives, this workshop explored the role of poetry and life-writing in post-war healing. The first workshop in our Textual Commemoration strand took place on Saturday 21 October 2017. Panellists included: Dunya Mikhail (poet); Philippe Sands, QC (barrister and writer); Lord (John) Alderdice (Liberal Democrat peer; former Speaker of the Northern Irish Assembly; Director of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict (CRIC)); Professor Jeremy Treglown (Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London); Chair: Professor Elleke Boehmer (Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford).
Launch event for the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Series. Aminatta Forna, OBE (novelist and memoirist, Lannan Visiting Professor of Poetics at Georgetown University) in conversation with Elleke Boehmer (Professor of World Literature in English, Oxford). In this conversation, which took place on 20 October 2017 at the University of Oxford, award-winning novelist and memoirist Aminatta Forna and Elleke Boehmer discuss the ways in which Forna's work (which includes her novel The Memory of Love and memoir about Sierra Leone, The Devil That Danced on the Water) has portrayed situations of conflict and post-conflict, and how literature can offer new perspectives on commemoration, reconstruction and reconciliation.