Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) will collaborate on a one-day workshop exploring how history is created, shared and made accessible to the public across Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) and its diaspora.
Titled “Our History and the Future: Lessons in Public and Participatory History from the SWANA Region,” the workshop will bring together scholars, archivists, artists, journalists and cultural practitioners on October 21 from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Qatar National Library. The event is organized by NU-Q’s Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South (#IAS_NUQ), in partnership with the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) at the University of Luxembourg, the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University, and Qatar National Library.
The workshop will explore how histories are made visible and sustainable in the region, with discussions focusing on digital media, archives, artificial intelligence and the challenges and possibilities of making history more participatory, publicly accessible, and forward thinking.
Connecting public history and the Global SouthThe workshop will run parallel to the inaugural conference on Public History in the Middle East, taking place at Qatar National Library on October 19 and 20 and represents a capstone to Public History as the New Citizen Science of the Past (PHACS), a six-year project at C²DH funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund.
Led by Thomas Cauvin, professor of public history at the University of Luxembourg, PHACS puts public history practices developed in Luxembourg and Europe into dialogue with approaches from the Global South, and has spurred several international partnerships, including with #IAS_NUQ.
“Northwestern Qatar’s strength lies in bringing rigorous and original voices together in a global conversation that opens new vistas. Workshops like this align with NU-Q’s mandate for research and academic excellence, reflecting our role as a distinctive US institution in the Global South,” said Marwan M. Kraidy, dean and CEO of Northwestern University in Qatar.
The collaboration has previously included a public panel hosted by #IAS_NUQ and C²DH at NU-Q in October 2025, titled “Digital Public History in a Global Context.” The event featured scholars and practitioners working on digital public history in Europe and Africa and was paired with a closed workshop for #IAS_NUQ postdoctoral scholars and undergraduate fellows. The partnership will also support individual exchanges, including a visit to C²DH this November by #IAS_NUQ Global Postdoctoral Scholar Angela Haddad, whose research examines the print history of Arab presence in the Caribbean.
Exploring public history in SWANA
Morning session: Media, Technology, AI, and Public History
The morning session highlights how digital media and technology can help build, preserve and share archives that remain publicly meaningful, historically grounded, and accountable. The discussion will draw on projects connected to the histories of Palestine, Syria and Türkiye.
Speakers include Refqa Abu Remaileh, associate professor in residence at NU-Q and creator of Country of Words, a digital atlas of Palestinian literary history; Sana Yazigi, founder of The Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, an online archive documenting tens of thousands of artworks from the Syrian uprising; and Özge B. Calafato, a scholar of vernacular photography and archives in Türkiye and author of Making the Modern Turkish Citizen. The discussion will be moderated by Angela Haddad, Global Postdoctoral Scholar at #IAS_NUQ.
Afternoon session: Doing Public History — Challenges and Potentials
The afternoon session examines to the practical challenges and possibilities of public history, including efforts to preserve marginalized and suppressed histories. Speakers include Jamila Ghaddar, an archivist and historian who founded the Archives & Digital Media Lab, and assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam; Abdulrahman Alebrahim, assistant professor of history at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, whose work examines marginalized and suppressed histories in the Gulf’s official archives; and Khalid Albaih, a Sudanese political cartoonist known for Khartoon!, whose work documenting the Arab Spring and its aftermath has been exhibited internationally.
The workshop concludes with a conversation among Thomas Cauvin, Clovis Bergère, and Akram Khater, director of the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University, moderated by Myriam Dalal, senior postdoctoral fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London on sustaining a network of public history scholars and practitioners in the SWANA region and connecting that work more broadly with the Global South.
Event information
Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Time: 10 a.m.–3:30 p.m.
Location: Qatar National Library
Participation is limited. Those interested in attending should email ias@qatar.northwestern.edu.
