#IAS_NUQ Panel
Northwestern University in Qatar
Education City, Qatar +974 4454 5100
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Hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South (#IAS_NUQ) and the Journalism and Strategic Communication Program, both at Northwestern University in Qatar, this panel revisits the role of historic media technologies in shaping the modern Middle East. Drawing from the past century, it highlights how various media forms, including cinema, magazines, books, audiocassettes, and video cassettes, became integral to everyday life across the 20th-century Middle East.
Panelists will bring media artifacts for a show-and-tell conversation that explores how these forms influenced public imagination and mediated social change. The Media Majlis Museum will also exhibit and discuss a Sony Betacam SP video camera, underscoring its significance in the evolution of media production.
Refqa Abu-Remaileh is an associate professor in residence in the Liberal Arts Program at Northwestern University in Qatar. She specializes in modern Arabic literature, with a focus on Palestinian literary history and cultural production. She is the author of the digital, interactive, award-winning monograph Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature, published by Stanford University Press in 2023. Before joining NU-Q, Abu-Remaileh was an associate professor of modern Arabic literature and film at Freie Universität Berlin. Between 2018 and 2023, she served as principal investigator of PalREAD–Country of Words, a large research grant funded by the European Research Council.
Diana Abbani is the Science Communication Coordinator at the Merian Center for Advanced Study in the Maghreb (MECAM). She earned her doctorate in Arabic Studies from Sorbonne University, where her dissertation explored “Music and Society in Beirut at the Time of the Nahda.” Abbani also holds dual master’s degrees in history and political science from Sorbonne University and the University of Saint-Denis in Paris. Her research focuses on the Levant’s social history in the first half of the 20th century, examining how social, political, and technological transformations, as well as the rise of the music industry and entertainment world, reshaped musical practices and cultural life in the region. She is currently developing this idea into a book project.
Andrew Simon is a historian of media, popular culture, and the Middle East. He was a fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and currently serves as the modern history book review editor for the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Simon is the author of Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (2022), which was recently translated into Arabic by Dar El Shorouk (2025). His current work includes a biography of Shaykh Imam, a blind performer and political dissident, as well as a digital archive that makes his private cassette collection publicly accessible.
Hicham Al Baker is the collection care and development manager for The Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern University in Qatar. He has extensive experience in the art and culture sector across public and private institutions, focusing on collection management, copyright, art law, exhibition development, and public art commissions. Al Baker is a graduate of the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he earned dual bachelor’s degrees in history of art and archaeology, and in law, as well as a master’s in business law with a specialization in art history. He also holds a professional master’s in art market studies with a focus on modern and contemporary art from the Institut d’Études Supérieures des Arts (IESA).
William Lafi Youmans is an associate professor in residence in the Journalism and Strategic Communication Program at Northwestern University in Qatar. He is broadly interested in questions of transnationalism, power, and news. His research examines the role of media and communication in U.S.–Arab relations, with a particular focus on immigration. He is the author of Unlikely Audience: Al Jazeera’s Struggle in America (Oxford University Press), which analyzes Al Jazeera’s efforts to enter the U.S. news market. He is currently working on two long-term projects. The first is a documentary film about Alex Odeh, a Palestinian American activist who was assassinated in Orange County, California, in 1985, a crime that remains unsolved and continues to affect the local community. The second is a digital video archive of Arab American TV, a program that aired from Los Angeles from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.
DATE
Sunday, November 16, 2025
TIME
2:30 - 4:00 p.m.LOCATION
Auditorium