Author and visual artist Moshtari Hilal will read passages from the English translation of her book Ugliness, published by New Vessel Press (2025) and translated by Elisabeth Lauffer. Hilal's book was first published in German under the title Hässlichkeit by Hanser Verlag (2023). The reading will be followed by a conversation with Penn English PhD student Mursal Sidiqi and Wolf Humanities Center Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Paniz Musawi Natanzi and a Q&A session.
A book signing and reception will follow.
Moshtari Hilal is a visual artist, writer, and curator based in Hamburg and Berlin. Born in Afghanistan, she pursued Islamic studies and political science in Hamburg, Berlin, and London. Her first book, Hässlichkeit (Ugliness), was awarded the Hamburg Literature Prize for non-fiction and was listed as one of the most beautiful German books by Stiftung Buchkunst. She is co-founder and co-curator of AVAH (Afghan Visual Arts and History) collective.
Paniz Musawi Natanzi is an interdisciplinary scholar of feminist and anti-colonial theory, visual culture, global politics, and war. Much of her empirical and theoretical work focuses on labor, knowledge, and migration in Afghanistan and its global political entanglements, with emphasis on Iran, Pakistan, and Germany. During her fellowship year at the University of Pennsylvania, she is affiliated with the Wolf Humanities Center and the Department of South Asia Studies, where she is working on her book manuscript with the tentative title The War Mode of Production: Masculinities, Artistic Labor and Race in Afghanistan. Currently, she is also teaching a cross-listed undergraduate course on "Masculinities and Politics in Global Perspective." For her doctoral dissertation, she did research in urban Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. After her Ph.D. (SOAS, University of London), she worked as a consultant in policy fields relating to gender, migration and labor, mental health, and prisons in Afghanistan. She was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Duke University Middle East Studies Center (DUMESC) in 2023–2024, and in the 2022-2023 theme year programming in "Feminist Theory and Imperialism" in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University.
Mursal Sidiqi is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Their dissertation project spans the eighteenth and nineteenth century to trace European technologies of national and racial formation as English and French writers engage with and form imaginations of Afghanistan. Mursal’s work interweaves queer studies, empire studies, and translation studies to examine cultural transformations undergone in England and France when their bourgeoisie first came into contact with Persian languages and eventually studied, translated, and imitated Persianate poetry. In the fall semester, they will teach an interdisciplinary undergraduate course titled “A Whole New World: Transformations and Translations of the Arabian Nights.” Mursal is also a co-organizer of Penn English’s Latitudes working group which hosts scholars of the global south and comparative race studies to discuss and workshop their current academic and creative projects.
