Majnun and Layla: Songs from Beyond the Grave

Born in 1991, Yann Damezin is passionate about literature and classical music. After his baccalaureate, he joined the prestigious Émile Cohl school in Lyon in order to realize his dream: to become an illustrator. Graphically, his influences are rich and diverse including Persian iconography, Italian primitives, expressionism. These varied influences infuse his visual universe with a very special dimension, tinged with fantasy. He has released several graphic novels in France to great acclaim, including Majnun et Leili, which won the prestigious Prix Orange de la BD, an award granted to promising newcomers to the comics (bande dessinee) scene.  Thomas Harrison, Ph.D., is the Vice Chair of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of European Languages & Transcultural Studies at UCLA, where he teaches literature, translation, aesthetic theory, and Italian film. His most recent book is Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account. He is also the author of 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance, a study of European expressionism across the arts, and of Essayism: Conrad, Musil and Pirandello. Aqsa Ijaz works on classical Persian poetry and studies its reception in mediaeval and early modern North India. Born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan – she is trained in classical music and specialises in the vocal forms of thumri and ghazal. As a scholar of Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi, her doctoral research focuses on the reception of the 12th century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi and examines the formative role of Nizami’s poetry in shaping the language of emotion in premodern North India. Besides her academic work, Aqsa is an essayist and a translator and writes for various international publications such as The World Literature Today, The Herald, and the Marginalia Review of Books. She is committed to sharing academic research with audiences across the globe and in this regard serves on the editorial board of The Marginalia Review of Books in Los Angeles. Currently, she teaches Urdu and Persian at the Department of Language Studies, and co-manages the The Global Past Research Initiative also at the University of Toronto Mississauga.