Millennial Aesthetics and Global Politics

Experience the Event

Presented by Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance

This event brings poet Aria Aber and author Jamil Jan Kochai into conversation with Mehak Faizal Khan, Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature at the University of Notre Dame.

Join acclaimed writers Aria Aber and Jamil Jan Kochai for an intimate exploration of the millennial Afghan experience. This evocative discussion, moderated by Mehak Faizal Khan, Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature at the University of Notre Dame, reveals how memory, war, and technology reshape contemporary identity. Witness how these leading voices bridge the chasm between ancestral memory and our digital present.

This event was sponsored by Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Creative Writing Program, Department of English, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, The Graduate School, Department of American Studies, Institute for Social Concerns, Teaching Beyond the Classroom Grants, The Brookline Booksmith Transnational Literature Series and the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good/Henkels Grant. It was recorded on March 19, 2026.

Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance is a research collective, conversation series, and digital archive dedicated to contemporary literature shaped by exile, transnational migration, and human rights violations. The series brings Southwest and Southeast Asian and North African writers and artists into sustained dialogue with American writers and scholars to imagine new modes of literary production across borders and cultivate intersectional solidarities. The series was developed as a global public humanities project in partnership with institutes and initiatives both within and beyond the University of Notre Dame, and was founded by author and Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at Notre Dame, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi in 2020.

For more information visit the event website.

Meet the Speaker: Aria Aber

Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and now lives in the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and graduate student at USC, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Raised speaking Farsi and German, she writes in her third language, English. She serves as the poetry editor of Amulet, as a contributing editor at The Yale Review, and works as an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Vermont. Aber divides her time between Vermont and Brooklyn.

Meet the Speaker: Jamil Jan Kochai

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award and a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and 2023 Clark Fiction Prize. His debut novel 99 Nights in Logar was a finalist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and a winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Kochai was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but his family originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in English from California State University, Sacramento, his Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis, and his Master of Fine Arts at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The Sewanee Review, and A Public Space, and they have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and The Norton Introduction to Literature. His essays have been published at The New Yorker, Literary Hub, and the Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He teaches creative writing at Princeton University.

Meet the Speaker: Mehak F. Khan

Mehak F. Khan is Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests span different modes of contemporary culture from the novel to social media. Her writing is forthcoming in Philological Encounters , Critical Pakistan Studies, and other venues. Dr. Khan holds a Ph.D in English with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in English with a minor in Game Design from New York University. Professor Khan’s current research is on theories and modes of strangeness that coalesce around the concept of “ajeeb” aesthetics – a framework that folds in affect theory, queer theory, and aesthetic theory. Other projects include an exploration of questions of state failure and game logics. She writes fiction and nonfiction, and is a founding editor of Tasavvur, a magazine for speculative South Asian fiction.