About The Indian Ocean Working Group
Through lectures, webinars, conferences, and monthly reading groups, the IOWG provides a platform for scholars from various disciplines to be in a conversation on the Indian Ocean World. We explore historical and contemporary issues concerning human mobility, arts and aesthetics, gender and the family, trade networks and religious diasporas, and race and ethnicity in the Persian Gulf, South Asia, and East Africa.
Faculty Leads
Rogaia Abusharaf
Dr. Abusharaf is a Professor of Anthropology and author of Darfur Allegory, Transforming Displaced Women in Sudan: Politics and the Body in a Squatter Settlement (U. of Chicago Press, 2009); Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives (Ed.).(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), and Wanderings (Cornell University Press, 2002).
Firat Oruc
Firat Oruc is Associate Professor of World Literature at GU-Q. His research and teaching specialties center on the multidisciplinary intersections of modern world literature, postcolonial global literatures, cultural and literary studies of the Middle East, translation studies, and world cinema.
M. Reza Pirbhai
Dr. Pirbhai is an Associate Professor, specializing in South Asian and world history. His research is focused on Islam in Modern South Asia with speciality in Islamic law and theology, Hindu nationalism, and British travel literature.
About the Founding of IOWG
Watch as four of the five founders discuss how the Indian Ocean Working Group came into being.
Speakers
Amira Sonbol, former Professor of History, Georgetown University in Qatar
Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Professor of Anthropology, Georgetown University in Qatar
Ahmad Sikainga, Professor of History, Ohio State University
Sandra L. Richards, Professor Emerita of African American Studies and Theater, Northwestern University in Qatar
Moderator
Uday Chandra, former Assistant Professor of Government, Georgetown University in Qatar