The Political Life of the Novel

Experience the Event

Presented by Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance

Join novelists Isabella Hammad, Brandon Hobson, and Amir Ahmadi Arian for an ontological inquiry into the aesthetics of resistance. Amidst the ongoing Nakba and systemic dispossessions, this dialogue interrogates the novel as a technology of resistance, transforming state violence into a grammar of human sovereignty and asserting historical truth against annihilation.

This event is 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.

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: Brandon Hobson

Dr. Brandon Hobson is a 2022 Guggenheim fellow. He received his PhD from Oklahoma State University. His novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking, was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Reading the West Award, and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, among other distinctions. His short stories have won a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, NOON, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at New Mexico State University and at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol. He is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.

Meet the Speaker: Isabella Hammad

Isabella Hammad is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Parisian (Grove Press, 2019), which won the 2019 Palestine Book Award. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, and the debut was praised by the New York Times Book Review as a “dazzling…deeply-imagined historical novel.” A love story set amidst the political tumult of Palestine in the early 20th century, The Parisian was awarded the the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors in the UK, and the Plimpton Prize. She is also the author of the amazingly erudite essay, Recognizing the Stranger (Grove Atlantic, 2024), on the Palestinian struggle and the power of narrative. Hammad’s writing has also appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review, The New York Times and elsewhere. Her story “Mr. Can’aan” won the 2019 O. Henry Prize and the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction.

Meet the Speaker: Amir Ahmadi Arian

Amir Ahmadi Arian was born in Ahvaz, Iran. He spent his childhood in the war zone of the Iran-Iraq war where his mother was a nurse in frontline hospitals. Amir started his writing career in Iran in 2000. He has published two novels, a collection of stories, and a book of nonfiction in Persian. He also translated from English to Persian novels by E.L Doctorow, Paul Auster, P.D. James, and Cormac McCarthy. Amir left Iran in 2011 to undertake a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Queensland, Australia. Since 2014 he has been writing exclusively in English. His first novel in English, Then The Fish Swallowed Him, was published by HarperVia/HarperCollins in March 2020. He is an Assistant professor of Creative Writing at Binghamton University and lives in Ithaca, New York.