Literature and Solidarity in Times of War

Anna Bernard is Professor of Comparative and World Literature at King's College London. She is the author of Decolonizing Literature (2023) and Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine (2013). She is currently working on a book called International Solidarity and Culture in Late Cold War Britain.

Elaine Mokhtefi is an American activist, translator, writer, and artist. She supported Algerian independence efforts from New York City and lived in Algeria from 1962 until she was forced to leave the country in 1974. 

Maura McCreight is a New York–based art historian, educator, and researcher specializing in modern art, the history of photography, and visual culture in North Africa. 

Georgina Fooks is a PhD candidate in Medieval and Modern Languages (Spanish) at the University of Oxford, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Clarendon Fund and the Trinity Christie Miller Scholarship. Her doctoral thesis explores the translational poetics of Argentine poets Alejandra Pizarnik and Susana Thénon. She is currently developing a project on the politics of poetry translation in Latin American magazines of the long 1960s.

Jeffrey Sacks studies, teaches, and writes about poetics, critical theory, and Arabic studies. He is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside, and the author, most recently, of Poeticality: In Refusal of Settler Life (Fordham UP, 2026). 

Georgia Nasseh is Research Fellow in the Literature of the Global South at King’s College, University of Cambridge. She completed a PhD in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. Her PhD research was concerned with multilingualism and translationality, with an emphasis on the work of Angolan author José Luandino Vieira. Her wider research is concerned with the Global Sixties, anti-colonial and liberation movements in Portuguese-speaking Africa, and Cold War aesthetics.

Haider Shahbaz is doing a PhD in Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is interested in South Asian and Black literatures, colonial and anticolonial thought, Marxism, and translation studies. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Literature Studies, boundary 2, Modernism/modernity, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jadaliyya, Caravan, and elsewhere. 

Stefan Aune is a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at Williams College; he was previously the Elihu Rose Scholar of Modern Military History at New York University. He is the author of Indian Wars Everywhere: Colonial Violence and the Shadow Doctrines of Empire (UC Press, 2023), a contributor to At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Rutgers, 2018), and the author of articles in American Quarterly and the Pacific Historical Review.

Sarah Bounabat pursues an MA in comparative literature (Université de Montréal). She works on representations of Tel el-Za’tar, especially Etel Adnan's L’Apocalypse arabe. As a research auxiliary, she also works on the interactions of literature, history, and memory. In November, at a conference (UQÀM), she will compare thematizations of death and militancy in texts on Tel el-Za’tar. She published an article on Beauvoir and Ferrante: https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2025.2516242

Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande is an archivist at the University of Ottawa's Women's Archives. She earned a PhD from Carleton University in 2025. Her research interests include twentieth century U.S. literature and culture; U.S. and Canadian social movements; political radicalism; working-class history; war, the military, and society; documentary media; and protest tactics. Her writing has been published in peer-reviewed and popular venues such as Pacific Affairs, Rabble, and American Quarterly. 

Sara Abou Rashed is a Palestinian poet, speaker, and creator of the one-woman show, A Map of Myself. Her work appears in The Kenyon Review, LA Review of Books, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Wales, and Arab Lit Quarterly, as well as in several anthologies. Commended by the UK Forward Prize and winner of the 2023 Hopwood Award for Poetry, Sara holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently pursuing a PhD in English at The Ohio State University. Her debut collection is forthcoming in 2026.

Tayseer Abu Odeh is a Palestinian-Jordanian writer and translator. He is the co-translator and co-author of poetry anthology from Gaza and the West Bank with Sherah Bloor, You Must Live, which was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2025. Among other outlets, his writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, , Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Harvard Divinity School’s Peripheries.

Sara Hussein is a PhD student in the History Department at UCLA. She researches social and intellectual histories of modern Egypt, decolonization, and pan-Africanist thought. Her dissertation focuses on transnational political networks of Afro-Arab anti-colonial solidarities, examining the role of Cairo as a hub of African revolution in the mid-twentieth century. She is co-editor of Ufahamu, Journal of African Studies. 

Başak Çandar is Associate Professor of English at Appalachian State University. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the relationship between literature and political violence (particularly in 20th century Turkish Literature) and theories and pedagogies of World Literature and Translation Studies.