Aftermath: Photographic Narratives from Northern Iraq and the Kashmir Valley
https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/2026/oct/aftermath
Kula Postdoctoral Fellow and Hannah Arendt Fellow at TIB, Nathaniel Brunt, will be speaking with Richard Ovenden at Oxford University on Wednesday, 7 October 2026 from 12.00–13.00 at the at the Weston Library.
A photograph made after mass violence contains and carries the impossible: it is evidence, a memorial, and sometimes, it is the only surviving likeness of a face. In the university, we sort these different functions into separate disciplines: from history to social sciences, to law. In society, the photograph spans the forensic to the tribunal, from the commemorative to the museum, from the public to the intimacy of the family album. One image does all of it at once.
For over a decade, Nathaniel Brunt has worked across boundaries by moving across photojournalism, archival practice, and historical research — making photographs, and preserving and activating those that already exist in institutional holdings and family collections. His lecture traces that work through his long-term projects with Yezidi communities in northern Iraq and the diaspora, and in the Kashmir Valley: photography as record and evidence, as memorialisation and healing, and as a means by which communities engage with difficult pasts and shape their futures.
Brunt holds a PhD from the joint Communication and Culture program at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University (SSHRC; Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation). He is a KULA Postdoctoral Fellow at UVic Libraries and a Hannah Arendt Fellow at TIB, Hannover. He will be joined by Richard Ovenden OBE, Bodley’s Librarian and Helen Hamlyn Director of the University of Oxford Libraries.
How can a library steward a photograph that was never made for it?