Experts Featured at Georgetown’s 10 Year Anniversary Faculty Conference

Dr. Laura Doyle

Some of the world’s most distinguished experts in the fields of culture, politics, and Islamic law and history will be among an elite array of global scholars participating in Georgetown University in Qatar’s upcoming Scapes of Power conference, organized to celebrate the school’s 10 year anniversary in Doha. Dr. Laura Doyle, from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst will be featured at the public conference recognizing a decade of academic and research excellence, to be held on GU-Q’s campus on February 3rd and 4th.

While scholars often attend conferences in their chosen fields, this anniversary conference will uniquely bring together a wide variety of specialists-from historians, to economists, to sociologists and more-to discuss a concept that invariably connects all the various academic disciplines:power. What is power? How is it exercised and by whom? What changes over space and time? These are the central questions that will be the highlight of the lively and engaging two-day public forum.

The opening will feature Dr. Laura Doyle, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, who will present “Inter-imperial Powerscapes”. The prolific author and co-director of the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project, which seeks to foster scholarship and teaching informed by non-eurocentric world history, will appraise how empires operate as cooperative units, and as such, influence a global environment, rather than focusing solely on empire as the specific areas of a state’s national interests. Her lecture will draw from her current project combining recent world historiography and postcolonial studies to reframe current discussions of world politics, globalization and empire.

The conference marking a decade of Georgetown University in Qatar will also include an array of topics spanning history from ancient Rome to modern China, as well as charting the globe from Latin America to Europe, Africa and Asia. Acclaimed speakers will provide innovative perspectives on ways power is manifest in subjects ranging from women and gender, to language, literature and the media. Speaker panels are titled: Empire…Then and Now, Within and Beyond the Nation-State, Empowering the Disempowered, and Forging Knowledge and Culture. The conference is free and open to the public. For more information about the featured speakers as well as on how to attend, please visit the conference website.