Politics and Modern Arab Art

Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi is an Emirati columnist and researcher on social, political and cultural affairs in the Arab Gulf States, and currently teaches at Georgetown University. He was a practitioner in residence at the Hagop Kevorkian Center of Near East Studies at New York University, and a Yale University Greenberg World Fellow. He is also the founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation, an independent initiative established in 2010 to contribute to the intellectual development of the art scene in the Arab region by building a prominent and publicly accessible art collection in the United Arab Emirates.  Sultan’s tweets became a major news source during the Arab Spring, rivaling the major news networks at the time, until TIME magazine listed him in the “140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2011.” In 2018 Sultan ranked 19th on the "Arabic Thought Leader Index" by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. Sultan is currently conducting research for a book that documents the modern architecture of the city of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, and Adjunct Instructor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University.