Scholar, poet, and translator, Dr. Choman Hardi returned home to teach English and Gender Studies at AUIS after 26 years of living abroad. Her research and teaching interests include poetry, feminist literature, feminist literary criticism, gender and genocide, masculinity, symbolic reparation, and women’s activism. After completing her education in the UK, Hardi was awarded a post-doctoral scholarship from the Leverhulme Trust. The resulting book, 'Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq' (Routlege, 2011), was named a UK Core Title by the Yankee Book Peddler. She founded AUIS's Center for Gender and Development studies (CGDS) in 2015. Two years later, CGDS announced the establishment of the first interdisciplinary gender studies minor in Iraq. Hardi's poetry has appeared in Poetry London, Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Washington Square Review, Exiled Ink, and Modern Poetry in Translation. Her English collections were published by Bloodaxe Books. Four poems from her first collection, Life For Us (2004), were selected onto UK's English GCSE syllabus in 2010. Her second collection, Considering The Women (2015), received a Recommendation by the Poetry Book Society and was shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her translation of Sherko Bekas’s Butterfly Valley (Arc Publishing, 2018) won a PEN Translates Award.
