On November 11, 2026, William Gallois, Marc Marin Webb, and Nathaniel Brunt will be in conversation at the Kurdish Studies Forum on Activating Photographic Archives After Armed Conflict. The conversation takes place at 11:30 am in the AUIS Conference Hall.

William Gallois is a Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean and Director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. He has formerly worked at a variety of universities in London and the Gulf.

Marc Marin Webb is an architect and holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of Pennsylvania (2026, Roger Allen Dissertation Award), where his dissertation examined the preservation of Yezidi sacred landscapes after the 2014 genocide. Trained as an architect in Barcelona and Berlin, he has worked on archaeological and heritage-preservation projects across Syria, Iraqi Kurdistan, and southern Iraq, including the conservation of the Yezidi Sanctuary of Sheikh Adi in Lalish since 2019. He is co-founder of the Sersal Project, an initiative dedicated to preserving, digitizing, and returning Yezidi photographic heritage to the communities it depicts, launched after he rediscovered a forgotten archive of 1930s Yezidi photographs at the Penn Museum.
 

Nathaniel Brunt is an interdisciplinary scholar, documentary photographer, and educator. His documentary and academic work critically examines modern armed conflict and the ways it is, and has been, represented photographically. Brunt completed his PhD in the joint Communication and Culture program at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University, with research supported by SSHRC and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.

Brunt's photographic work has been widely published and exhibited internationally. He is currently working on long-term projects in Northern Iraq and the Kashmir Valley and holds appointments as a KULA Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria Libraries and a Hannah Arendt Fellow at TIB in Hannover, Germany. While diverse in format, his work is united by a commitment to producing projects that personalize the often-abstract nature of modern war.