Day: December 19, 2022

Islamabad, December 19, 2022 (PPI-OT):The Department of English organized a public lecture titled “What Makes High Achievement Possible?: A Transversal Perspective from Neurochemistry to Performance”. Dr. Asma Mansoor and Dr. Arshad Mehmood of the Department were the convener of the public lecture.

The guest speaker was Professor Bryan Reynolds, Chancellor’s Professor and Claire Trevor Professor, Department of Drama, Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine. Dr Reynolds received his PhD in English and American Literature from Harvard University, and his BA in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

He has held visiting professorships at the University of London-Queen Mary; University of Amsterdam; Utrecht University; University of Cologne; University College Utrecht; Goethe University Frankfurt; the University of California-San Diego; the American University of Beirut; the University of Tsukuba, Japan; Klagenfurt University, Austria; the University of Nairobi, Kenya; and the University of Lorraine, France. Using an interdisciplinary approach while citing examples of athletes overcoming obstacles in extreme sports, he presented his theorization of how the mental processes and grit observed in both able-bodied and differently abled athletes, can be used as a paradigm to rethink failure in all walks of life and to go beyond them.

As a performance theorist and theatre practitioner (director, playwright, actor), and having been a lifelong high level action sports athlete at alpine skiing and motorcycle motocross (one-time professional), he explores not just the mind-set, training, and physicality needed to persevere and progress, but also genetic factors.

For seven years he has been conducting immersive ethnographic – participant-observer – research into skiing, skateboarding, and mountain biking, and more recently back to motocross, which has involved not just participating with but also interviewing the highest level Olympic and X Games athletes, taking saliva samples from them for DNA analysis, and performing experiments with mice in a laboratory to uncover what is needed to progress at extremely challenging and highly skilled activities of all kinds. He then synthesizes and relates everything he has learned so that all people can apply the techniques – mental and physical – he has discovered to any area in which they want to excel.

The students and faculty of the Department of English subsequently asked him questions, correlating his findings and observations with issues including academic success, struggles with research and even collective dilemmas as citizens of a postcolonial society. at the end, Dr. Reynolds was presented a university souvenir in appreciation for his lecture and his engagement with the department and its students.

For more information, contact:
Public Relations,
International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI)
Room No.118, Admin Block, New Campus,
H-10 Sector, Islamabad, Pakistan
Tel: +92-51-9019249
Fax: +92-51-9257909
Email: iiuipublicrelations@iiu.edu.pk
Website: www.iiu.edu.pk

Islamabad, December 19, 2022 (PPI-OT):The Department of English successfully held a two-day Pakistan Workshop as part of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council’s ‘Muslim Women Popular Genre’ project that has been won by Dr. Aroosa Kanwal.

A unique project in every sense of the term, this project aims at excavating the forgotten, ignored, erased, unread, unheard, works by Muslim women in general and Pakistani women in particular, who are creating a diverse array of hitherto unacknowledged fiction in not only Urdu and English but in the diverse languages that constitute Pakistan’s rich cultural and linguistic spectrum.

The aim of this project is specifically to identify Pakistani women experimenting in the speculative genre and to develop a strong critical discourse around it. In this two-day workshop a rich array of key note speeches, talks and panel sessions was arranged not merely by Pakistani authors dabbling in the speculative genre but also with critics and scholars, both based in Pakistan and abroad. The first session was titled ‘New Market, New Readers: The Scope for Pakistani Speculative Literature’.

The expert was Professor Graeme Harper who is Dean at The Honors College Oakland University. He has a doctorate in Creative arts and in Philosophy from the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of East Anglia respectively.

He has a rich global experience in various academic roles across the UK, Australia and the USA. His talk titled “Creative Writing as Global Exchange: Women Writing Pakistani Popular Fiction” covered the scope of Pakistani Speculative Fiction in terms of its international receptivity in non-Pakistani cultures.

In terms of its being a unique form of Creative Writing, Professor Harper emphasised that through its ability to develop empathy that cross-cultural boundaries, Pakistani Speculative Fiction by women writers has a rich future ahead.

The second session of the first day was titled ‘Politics of Marginalization of Literatures in Local Languages’. In this bilingual session, the panellists Ms. Farheen Khalid, Ms. Fatima Usman, Ms. Safia Shahid and Mr. Shoaib Khaliq foregrounded the reasons why Pakistani Women’s Speculative Fiction in Pakistan’s multi-lingual canvas remains a rarity.

As playwrights, writers and critics written in the local languages of Pakistan, the speakers foregrounded the scope and potential of women writers to go beyond the constraints of realism and domestic issues to highlight broader issues of a globalized range.

At the end of the day, the first key note address of the workshop was delivered by Dr. Sarah Ilott who is Senior Lecturer in English and Film. She is currently writing a book on Screening Multicultural Britain: Race, Racism and British Comedy, forthcoming with Palgrave in 2023.

She is co-lead of the Centre for Migration and Postcolonial Studies (MAPS) at Manchester Met and a member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies (MCGS). Externally, she is on the organising team of the comedy and gender research network ‘Mixed Bill’ and a member of the Postcolonial Studies Association.

Dr. Ilott foregrounded the role of British rom-coms to subvert conceptualisations of Muslim women’s agency in Great Britain and the scope of popular genres to project alternative conceptions of Muslim women thereby contesting Islamophobia.

The second day of the workshop started with a panel discussion titled ‘Pakistani Popular Genre: Dialogic Encounters between the Local and the Global’. The panellists included Dr. Javeria Farooqui from COMSATS University, Lahore, Professor Safeer Awan (Professor, Department of English, and National University of Modern Languages), Dr. Sibghatallah Khan (Assistant Professor, Department of English, and National University of Modern Languages) and Dr. Sibel Bayram (Head of the Turkish Department, National University of Modern Languages).

The panellists covered a range of issues in a very dynamic discussion, including the ideological underpinnings of the speculative genre in Pakistan and the wider appeal and uniqueness of Pakistani Speculative literature by writers including Maha Khan Phillips, Saba Tahir and Sidra B. Sheikh, etc.

The next session titled ‘In Conversation with Authors’ featured a star cast of notable authors of Pakistani Speculative fiction who are making ripples in the international scene including Osama Siddique, Usman T. Malik and Sadia Khatri.

The panellists, all with outstanding international profiles, discussed how their works are interwoven within the broader glocal dialogues pertaining to the speculative genre and the ways in which Pakistani speculative fiction is re-imagining futures in alignment with the Muslim past and mythos. They also talked about their respective works and the alternatives pasts, presents and futures they are conjuring up.

The final event of the Workshop was a keynote address by Dr. Shazia Sadaf who teaches Human Rights and Social Justice in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of London, United Kingdom, and a second doctoral degree in Postcolonial Studies from Western University, Canada, with a primary interest in the field of human rights literature.

Her talk was titled “Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and Human Rights” foregrounded how Pakistani Speculative writers were presenting new conceptions of what it means to be human, Muslims and Pakistanis in a world marked by fears of the apocalypse and AI proliferation.

The students were extremely interested in all events, impressing all the panellists with their insightful questions and their willingness to engage with the authors and academics invited to the event. The two day workshop ended with Dr. Aroosa Kanwal thanking the speakers, the audience and particularly the organisers of the event, she especially lauded the students Afaq Rabbani, Danyal Khan, Wahid Ullah, Shamza Maryam, Hadia Waqar, Saba Khaliq and Maryam Khanzada for their constant support and help. She also warmly appreciated the help of Dr. Farrukh Nadeem, Dr. Arshad Mehmood Raja and Dr. Asma Mansoor for their consistent support not only in the organisation of the event but also in its planning and conceptualisation.

For more information, contact:
Public Relations,
International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI)
Room No.118, Admin Block, New Campus,
H-10 Sector, Islamabad, Pakistan
Tel: +92-51-9019249
Fax: +92-51-9257909
Email: iiuipublicrelations@iiu.edu.pk
Website: www.iiu.edu.pk