Join us for a panel on "Shaping COP30 - Building Narratives for Global Climate Advocacy".
A biodiversity-themed photo exhibition in the library throughout the week from September 7-13, featuring works of Jassim Al Buainain, Daniel de Granville, Ali Saifaldeen, and Fernando Faciole.
Location: Georgetown University Qatar, Library
In Sudan, a war too often ignored has torn apart lives, crippled institutions, and forced more than thirteen million people from their homes. A humanitarian crisis ravages the present and threatens both past and future, jeopardizing a rich cultural legacy. SEEING SUDAN: POLITICS THROUGH ART will convene a historic gathering of academics, artists, and activists to examine the relationship between sociopolitical dynamics and cultural production. This conference, the tenth installment of Georgetown University in Qatar’s acclaimed Hiwaraat series, will generate critical insights into Sudanese creativity and resilience in the face of violence and displacement.
Location: Four Seasons Hotel, Doha
Isabella Hammad is the author of Recognizing the Stranger and the novels The Parisian and Enter Ghost. She has received the Aspen Prize, the Clark Prize, and the Encore Award from the Royal Society of Literature among other prizes, and her work has been supported by the Lannan Foundation, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination. She was the 2024-2025 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and she has taught literature and creative writing at NYU, Brown University, and Al Quds Bard College.
Date: Tuesday, September 23, 2025
Time: 5:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Venue: Auditorium, Ground Floor, Georgetown University in Qatar
Join acclaimed British-Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad for a fireside chat with Dean Safwan Masri. Together they will discuss her extraordinary biographical novel about her great-grandfather, The Parisian, which evokes with exquisite subtlety the culture of Nablus and the political currents that shaped Palestine in the early twentieth century.
Isabella has received the Aspen Prize, the Clark Award, and the Encore Award from the Royal Society of Literature, and has taught literature and creative writing at NYU, Brown University, and Al Quds Bard College.
Time: 1:00 - 2:00 PM
Location: Library, Georgetown University Qatar
Kindly note that on-site parking is unavailable. Please consider the following access options:
- Park at Oxygen Park, ride the Education City tram, and get off at Al Khater House.
- Choose to be dropped off directly at GU-Q.
- Use metro and get off at Qatar National Library station, and take a short walk to GU-Q.
Anyone concerned by the rise of disinformation-spreading, human rights-violating authoritarian yet elected leaders across the world should reflect on what the arrest and detention at the International Criminal Court of ex-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte signals. Does it signal that justice is finally being served for the tens of thousands of poor Filipinos killed in Duterte’s drug war? Does it mean that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., whose corrupt family came back to power through massive disinformation and an alliance with the Duterte dynasty, is now on the side of truth and accountability – while keeping the billions they stole? The Duterte case should also prompt reflection regarding the ICC’s future and the prospects for transitional justice in countries going through or emerging from war, political violence, or dictatorship. The Court has learned lessons from its role in promising as well as failed transitions in Colombia, Kenya, and Sudan. It has widened its docket. It has opened cases beyond African and Arab countries. It has issued warrants of arrest against Israeli leaders. But it is also facing an existential threat from the United States and Israel — including threats from Benjamin Netanyahu coursed through Duterte’s lawyer at the Court. This discussion will reflect on how hopeful and how cynical Filipinos and non-Filipinos on the side of justice and accountability ought to be when Duterte is finally tried for crimes against humanity at the ICC.
Date: Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Time: 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Venue: Auditorium, Ground Floor, Georgetown University in Qatar
About the Book:
Prior to the East India Company’s establishment in India in 1661, Islamic law was widely applied by the Mughal Empire. But as the Company’s power grew, it established a court system intended to limit Islamic law. Following the Great Rebellion of 1857, the decentralized Islamic legal system was replaced with a new standardized system. Islamic Law on Trial interrogates the project of juridical colonization and demonstrates that alongside—and despite—the violent displacement of Muslim legal sovereignty, Muslims were able to engage with and even champion Islamic law from inside the colonial judiciary. The outcome of their work was a paradoxical legal terrain that appeared legitimate to both Muslim practitioners and English colonizers. Sohaira Siddiqui challenges long-standing assumptions about Islamic law under British rule, the ways in which colonial power displaced preexisting traditions, and how local Muslim elites navigated the new institutions imposed upon them.
About the Author:
Sohaira Z. M. Siddiqui is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar. She is author of Law and Politics under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni and editor of Locating the Sharia.
Date: Sunday, September 28, 2025
Time: 6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
Venue: Bookstore, Ground Floor, Georgetown University in Qatar
GU-Q Visiting Fellow, Comedian, Actress, Writer, and Disability Advocate.
Disability Community (DisCo) fosters empathy, challenges stereotypes, and celebrates the power of intersectional perspectives.
Featuring Nawaal Akram (SFS'29) & Tuan Nguyen (SFS'27).
Time: 5:30 - 6:30 PM
Location: Faculty Conference Room (1D02), Georgetown University Qatar
In the face of horrors in Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere, many have looked to international law as a remedy. Indeed, cases have been brought to international courts and States and the UN have declared law to be violated. But the horrors continue. In consequence, some have pronounced international law ‘dead’. Others insist that the role of power, and consequent double standards in enforcement, can be challenged through current global structures. This public event will feature a lecture by Professor Ralph Wilde, followed by a conversation between him and Professor Diana Buttu, where they will critically reflect on the idea that international law is dead.
Professor Noha Aboueldahab will moderate the discussion.
Date: Wednesday October 1, 2025
Time: 6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
Venue: Auditorium, Ground Floor, Georgetown University in Qatar
Decolonizing Energy: The Past, Present, and Future of Energy Justice. This conference, the eleventh installment of Georgetown University in Qatar’s acclaimed Hiwaraat series, will generate critical insights into decolonizing energy.
Decolonizing Energy convenes a series of urgent public discussions with leading scholars, artists, and writers in the emerging field of decolonial energy studies. It will create space to develop a new energy dialogue oriented toward and located in the Global South, one which foregrounds energetic liberation. It will invite Doha’s cosmopolitan community into the ongoing conversation about the cultural and political facets of our energy system. By revisiting the decolonial project through the perspective of energy, this symposium addresses the colonial legacies of the energy systems we live in and with, while also considering historical and contemporary visions of “taking back power” and energy justice.
Location: Georgetown University in Qatar