#IAS_NUQ Global Fellow Colloquium
Northwestern University in Qatar
Education City, Qatar +974 4454 5100
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What happens when fathers disappear? This talk traces Sara’s search for narrative and familial structure in the wake of paternal estrangement. By connecting found domestic objects such as photographs, cassettes, VHS tapes, crafts, and letters, Mourad composes sketches of the absent father through the lens of Pan-Arab and Leftist political defeat, postwar debt, and Gulf migration in Lebanon.
These sketches are interwoven with traces of the missing father gathered from Lebanese films, plays, and literary writings. No longer the guardian of the household nor the custodian of the family’s security, the eclipse of the father reveals much about the fluidity of gender roles and the transformation of patriarchy in contemporary Lebanese society.
Sara Mourad is an assistant professor of media studies at the American University of Beirut. She is a writer, teacher, and scholar of gender, media, and Arab public cultures. Her research examines the cultural politics of sexuality and the histories and epistemologies of contemporary feminist thought.
Her work, published in both English and Arabic, spans academic journals, edited volumes, and media and literary platforms. Mourad received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She was a Global Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality in 2018 and a 2021–22 EUME Fellow at the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin. She is currently completing her first monograph, An Intimate History of Debt and Inheritance in Postwar Lebanon.
As an #IAS_NUQ Global Fellow, Mourad will work on her book-in-progress, The Skull in the Attic, which examines the family home as both a place and an archive, exploring how ruptures within the family and the nation shape alternative forms of belonging in postwar Lebanon.
DATE
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
TIME
1:00 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.
LOCATION
Room: 1-300