Hiwar Scholars Seminar: Fall 2025

Etched in Memory: Filming Pain, Resistance, and Indigenous Struggle in the Shadow of War

SPEAKER

Christina Paschyn is an assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern University in Qatar and an award-winning Ukrainian American filmmaker and journalist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Chatham House, The Markaz Review, and the Christian Science Monitor, among other outlets. Her latest documentary, Etched in Memory, offers a rare glimpse into the Russo-Ukrainian war through the eyes of the Crimean Tatars, Ukraine’s Indigenous Muslim community.

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Ontology, Morality, Strategy: Inter-country comparison of news reporting of the Russia-Ukraine war

SPEAKER

Ben O’Loughlin is Professor of International Relations and Director of the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is co-editor of the journal Media, War & Conflict. He was Special Advisor to the UK Parliament Select Committee on Soft Power and Thinker In Residence on 'Disinformation and Democracy' at the Royal Academy in Brussels.

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Islamic Law on Trial: Contesting Colonial Power in British India

SPEAKER

Sohaira Siddiqui is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar. Her research interests include classical Islamic legal theory and political thought, Islamic law under colonialism, contemporary Islamic family law, and issues of gender, authority, and participation.

Her first monograph, Law and Politics Under the Abbasids (Cambridge University Press, 2019), analyzes the work of the 11th century jurist and theologian Abu Ma’ali al-Juwayni through a close reading of his legal, political, and theological treatises. Her second monograph, Islamic Law on Trial: Contesting Colonial Power in British India (University of California Press, 2024), focuses on the juridical thought of the first Muslim judges to serve on the high courts in British India. The project analyzes the changing dynamics of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence after the promulgation of Anglo-Muhammadan law and the participation of Muslims in the adjudicative process. She has published numerous articles in Islamic Law and Society, Journal of Islamic Studies, Journal of the American Oriental Society, and Middle East Law and Governance.

Dr. Siddiqui is also the editor of Locating the Shari’a: Legal Fluidity in Theory, History and Practice (Brill, 2019) and is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Law (Cambridge University Press, 2026) 

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Being human in digital times

SPEAKER

Myria Georgiou is a Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science – LSE. Professor Georgiou researches and teaches on migration and urbanisation in the context of intensified mediation. Adopting a comparative and critical humanist

epistemology, she is committed to putting the human of the urban, transnationally connected world at the core of her research. Specifically, in research conducted across 6 countries over the last 25 years, she has

been studying communication practices and media representations that profoundly, but unevenly, shape meanings and experiences of citizenship and identity. 

Her latest book is Being Human in Digital Cities (Polity/Wiley 2024). She is also the author and editor of five other books, including Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference (2013, Polity Press) and The Digital Border (2022, NYU Press, with L.Chouliaraki). 

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The Poetry of Islamic Africa

SPEAKErs

Oludamini Ogunnaike is Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia specializing in the intellectual and artistic dimensions of West and North African Sufism and Yoruba oriṣa traditions. He received his PhD from the department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and his A.B. in Cognitive Neuroscience and African studies from Harvard College. He is the author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (Penn State University Press, 2020) winner of the ASWAD's (Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora) Outstanding First Book Prize, Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīḥ Poetry and its Precedents (Islamic Texts Society, 2020), and The Book of Clouds (Fons Vitae, 2024). He is the host of a podcast, The Logic of the Birds, about Sufi poetry and poetics.

Zachary Wright is Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at Northwestern University in Qatar and Professor of History and Religious Studies in the Liberal Arts program. He also currently serves as director of Northwestern University’s Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa, as well as the incoming editor-in-chief of the Islamic Africa journal. Wright received his PhD in History from Northwestern University, his MA in Arabic studies/Middle East history from the American University in Cairo, and his BA in History from Stanford University. His research focuses on Islamic intellectual history in West and North Africa, with book publications including The Chronicles of Two West African Kingdoms: The Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār of the Songhay Empire and the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi (co-authored with M. Nobilio and A. Diakité, British Academy, forthcoming 2026); Realizing Islam: The Tijāniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World (University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Jihad of the Pen: The Sufi Literature of West Africa (co-authored with R. Ware and A. Syed, American University in Cairo Press, 2018); and Living Knowledge in West African Islam: The Sufi Community of Ibrāhīm Niasse (Brill, 2015).

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