Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi

Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar, Middle East Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School

Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi was appointed as the Kuwait Foundation visiting scholar at the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs for fall 2021. He is also a lecturer at the School of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University. Al Qassemi, along with Todd Reisz, is co-editor of Building Sharjah (Birkhauser, 2021). He is also the co-editor of Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf (Routledge, 2021). A columnist and researcher on social, political, and cultural affairs in the Gulf Arab states, Al Qassemi is also founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. He was an MIT Media Lab director’s fellow from 2014-16, a practitioner-in-residence at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University in spring 2017, and a Yale Greenberg world fellow in 2018. Al Qassemi was a visiting instructor at the Council of Middle East Studies at Yale University, the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, the American University of Paris, the Islamic Civilization and Societies program at Boston College, and the School of Public Affairs at Sciences Po, Paris.

Book Launch: Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf

On October 26, AGSIW hosted the book launch of "Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf" on architectural production in the modernization era in the Arabian Peninsula.