Our Kashkul
Inspired by the Sufi’s begging bowl and a heartfelt sense of urgency to bring Kurdish and Iraqi culture to a global audience, we formed our Kashkul. The research and arts collaborative based in the heart of our campus works with established, emerging, and student artists to study, create and preserve culture in Iraq. Founded in 2016, Kashkul has been home to major research projects: Mosul Lives - now the second largest oral history database in the Middle East - Arrival, through which we have published over a thousand pages of Sorani and Kurmanji Kurdish, and Arabic poetry in English translation, and Kashkulistan, in which we work to amplify local preservation efforts such as those underway at Zheen Archive. In addition to our research and translation projects, we host events, speaker series, and an annual artist-in-residency program.
Kashkul maintains regional and international partnerships with institutions such as the Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies and the Centre for Kurdish Studies at the University of Exeter, University of Southampton, University Royal Holloway, London, Oxford, and the University of California, Los Angeles. We participate in the Digital Libraries Program, funded by Arcadia, at UCLA, which our staff has collected and written, making them available to the global scholarly audience.
Our student interns and staff have published in major literary outlets in the westlike Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, The Iowa Review, The Poetry Society of America, The Sewanee Review, Bengal Lights, Asymptote, LitHub, LARB, Believer Magazine, publishing books with our own publication series, Kashkul Books, as well as with Phoneme Media and Deep Vellum.
This spring, we are proud to announce 'Curating Kurdishness: Arts, Culture, and the Archive in Kurdistan and Beyond,' a new partnership between Kashkul and Exeter’s Centre for Kurdish Studies. You can join us throughout the first half of 2021 for this new virtual series hosted by Professor Christine Robins and Dr. Marie LaBrosse. Our panelists range from poets, publishers, and archivists to photojournalists, musicologists, historians and academic scholars. The conversations highlight AUIS’ connectivity with our community and the amazing partnerships the university has throughout the Iraq region. Moreover, it gives our students and alumni a chance to interact with some of our region’s best minds. Additionally, Exeter is advertising its newly re-launched Masters degree in Kurdish Studies and hoping to boost its graduate school applications; these sessions serve as an opportunity for our students and alumni to learn about that program as well as connect personally with its director, Professor Christine Robins. The conversation series also strengthens cooperation between Slemani and Exeter, two cities that have recognized creativity as a strategic factor of sustainable development and are member cities of UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network. .
Spearheaded by Kashkul’s director, Dr. Marie LaBrosse, and then-artist-in-residence David Shook, our center for arts and culture worked on Slemani’s successful application to become a UNESCO Creative City of Literature. The 40-page application, bringing together the Governorate, Directorate for Culture, Zheen Archive, The Kurdish Heritage Institute, AUIS, and the University of Slemani, as well as many local bookstores, writers unions, and cultural groups, usually takes two years of extensive research to finalize. With the help of Slemani’s Governor Dr. Haval Abu Bakir and Babkir Drayi, the city’s director of arts and culture, we were able to submit the application in only two months. Given Slemani’s literary history and vibrant present, we see our UNESCO designation as an opportunity to celebrate the city’s character, encourage collaborative efforts between our main literary stakeholders, and participate in the global literary and wider cultural conversation. We particularly emphasize the engagement of emerging cultural leaders and practitioners. We are dedicated to literature as a driving force behind the city’s long term sustainability and job creation. Worldwide, UNESCO’s Creative Cities work together toward a common objective: placing creativity and cultural industries at the heart of our development plans at the local level and cooperating actively at the international level.
Of all our accomplishments, we are most proud that we often employ AUIS alumni. Kashkul intentionally works with recent graduates, offering close mentorship, professional development workshops, and publication opportunities that specifically build each person’s ability to compete worldwide for the best graduate school positions. First-generation Kashkulers currently reside in Doha, Exeter, Iowa City and Dublin where they are continuing to grow and learn. Dr. Marie’s favorite thing to say is, “Go get your graduate degrees and then come back and take my job!”
If you want to get involved with Kashkul, you can drop by our office any time, talk to a Kashkuler, or send an email to kashkul@auis.edu.krd.
Sarwar Efendi is an AUIS 2019 graduate, Assistant Director at Kashkul and the City-Liaison at Slemani UNESCO City of Literature
The Voice is committed to publishing diverse opinions. The views expressed in this Editorial are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of the AUIS Voice editorial staff or AUIS in general.
- Sarwar Efendi