Sunday, March 29, 2026
5:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. (GMT+03:00) Doha
Location: Fire Station and Livestream
Modern Arab intellectual and literary cultures emerged in the great cities of Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo in struggles against European imperialism. Post-colonial states adopted many of their forms, but their failures and weaknesses led to a stalemate. What are the resources available for the creation of a new Arab culture and identity? What contributions can the Arab world make to addressing global challenges, including climate crisis and the AI revolution?
Participants
Nesrine Malik
Nesrine Malik is an acclaimed British Sudanese author and journalist known for her wide-ranging commentary on issues of race, identity, politics, and international affairs. She is the author of We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent (2019) and has columns in leading outlets including the Guardian, New York Times, and Washington Post that address topics ranging from Islamophobia and feminism to African politics, with deep insights into the ways colonial and postcolonial legacies shape our contemporary world. Malik received the 2021 Robert B. Silvers Prize for Journalism.
Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote is an Indian poet, theorist, and curator whose influential work centers on the complex history and presence of cultural pluralism from the local to the global. He has authored eight books of poetry—including Icelight (2022), Jonahwhale (2018), and a translation of a fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic-poet, I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Dĕd (2011)—and the acclaimed book Confluences: Forgotten Histories between East and West (2012, with Ilija Trojanow). Hoskote has curated more than 50 showcases of Indian and global art over the past three decades, including India’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Ahdaf Soueif
Ahdaf Soueif is a political and cultural commentator and one of Egypt’s most influential novelists. Her most recent book, This is Not a Border (2017), reflects on the first decade of the Palestine Festival of Literature. The festival takes place in occupied Palestine and was co-founded by Soueif in 2007. In 2014, she published a firsthand account of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed. Her book The Map of Love (1999) has been translated into over 30 languages and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999. She received the first Mahmoud Darwich Award in 2010 and the European Culture Foundation Princess Margriet Award in 2019, among other honors.
Safwan Masri
Safwan M. Masri is dean of Georgetown University in Qatar and distinguished professor of the practice at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. Prior to joining Georgetown in October 2022, Masri was executive vice president for global centers and global development at Columbia University, where he was also a senior research scholar at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Accessibility
Please email globaldialogues@georgetown.edu by March 25 with any accessibility requests. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests made after this date.