Eve Troutt Powell, the inaugural speaker at the Dean’s Global Forum, is a MacArthur fellow and the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
The forum is a new lecture series at Northwestern Qatar that will feature diverse leaders from academe, media, the arts, and public affairs in conversation with the school’s dean, Marwan M. Kraidy, on enduring issues and pressing global matters. The conversations will also include the speakers’ career journeys and life experiences.
“With a focus on the Global South, this initiative aligns with our mission to promote interdisciplinary discussions on important topics and big ideas that are shaping the narrative and future of the world today,” said Kraidy. “While, at the same time, we will delve into how our speakers arrived at where they are today – who and what influenced their career decisions?”
The inaugural lecture, which will take place on February 17, “Race in the Middle East and North Africa: From the Ottoman Empire to Black Lives Matter,” reflects Troutt Powell’s scholarship on racial issues and colonialism in the region.
An authority on colonialism and slavery in the Ottoman Empire and the Nile Valley, Troutt Powell is a historian of the modern Middle East, focusing on Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. She is the author of A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan, the co-editor, with John Hunwick, of The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam, and Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement in Egypt, Sudan and the Late Ottoman Empire.
Troutt Powell received her BA, MA, and PhD in history and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University. Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, she taught at the University of Georgia. She has received fellowships from the American Research Center in Egypt and the Social Science Research Council and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
For more information on the forum and to register, click here.
