Speakers

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi is a British award-winning author, playwright and film-maker and screenwriter of Pakistani and English descent. He studied philosophy from King’s College, London and went on to become a writer in residence at the Royal Court Theatre, London. His 1984 screenplay for “My Beautiful Laundrette” was nominated for an Oscar. He is the author of “The Buddha of Suburbia” winner of the Whitbread award, “The Black Album”, “Intimacy”, “Gabriel’s Gift”, “Something to Tell You”, and “The Last Word”. He has also published short stories and non-fiction that includes his 2004 memoir “My Ear at His Heart”. Kureishi received the C.B.E. for his literary services in 2008, and Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts des Lettres in France. His works have been translated into 36  languages, and are famous for the raw and incisive exploration of themes like racism, sexual politics, people at the margins etc.

Aamer Hussein

Aamer Hussein is a Pakistani short story writer and critic. He was born in Karachi in 1955 and later moved to London in his teen years. He is the author of short story collections “Mirror to the Sun”, “This Other Salt”, “Turquoise”, “Cactus Town”, “Insomnia”, “The Cloud Messenger”, and “Another Gulmohar Tree”, also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. He writes reviews for The Independent, and lectures at the University of Southampton. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004 and has been on the jury of the 2002 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize and 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.  He is the editor of Kahani: Short Stories by Pakistani Women.

Anand Taneja

Anand Taneja is, in his own words, a “historically informed” anthropologist working on religion and popular culture in urban South Asia. He graduated from Delhi University and Jamia Millia Islamia, and later went on to get a doctorate from Columbia University in 2013. He is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. He has edited “Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East” and is the author of “Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi”.

Ishrat Husain

Ishrat Husain is an economist, author and banker who served as the Governor State Bank of Pakistan from 1999 to 2006, and served in the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi from 2008-2016 in the capacity of a Dean. He completed his education from Williams College and Boston University. Currently, he is a member of the Economic Advisory Council  and adviser to the PM for Institutional Reforms and Austerity. He is the author of “Economic Management in Pakistan”, “Pakistan: The Economy of an Elitist State”, and “Governing the Ungovernable” and is also the recipient of Jinnah award.

Azeem Ibrahim

Azeem Ibrahim is a Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Global Policy in Washington. He has served as an International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, World Fellow at Yale and a Rothermere Fellow at the University of Oxford. He also sits on the Board of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence at the Department of War Studies at Kings College London and was ranked as a Top 100 Global Thinker by the European Social Think Tank in 2010 and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. His written works include “The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide” and “Radical Origins: Why we are losing the battle against Islamic Extremism”.

Najam Sethi

Najam Sethi is a Pakistani journalist and political commentator who serves as the editor-in-chief of The Friday Times. He hosted the primetime current affairs how Aapas ki Baat on Geo News and served as Chairman of Pakistan Super League as well as Chairman PCB. He was the caretaker Chief Minister of Punjab during the 2013 election. Sethi is the owner of Vanguard Books, and the spouse of Jugnu Mohsin, an incumbent MPA from Punjab. Sethi was awarded the 1999 International Press Freedom Award of the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists and the 2009 World Association of Newspapers Golden Pen of Freedom Award.

Zahid Hussain

Zahid Hussain is an award winning journalist and writer. He is a former correspondent for The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal. He also has covered Pakistan and Afghanistan for several other international publications, including Newsweek, Associated Press, The Economist and India Today. He is a former senior editor at The Newsline. He is regular columnist for Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English language newspaper. His notable written publications include The struggle with militant Islam (2007), The scorpion’s Tail: The relentless rise of Islamic militants in Pakistan (2010) and Pakistan’s Tribal Areas and Regional Security.

Anupama Rao

Anupama Rao is TOW Associate Professor of History, Senior Editor of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Acting Director, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society

She has research and teaching interests in gender and sexuality studies; caste and race; historical anthropology; social theory; comparative urbanism; and colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism.

Kristian Berg Harpvike

Kristian Berg Harpviken is a sociologist and a Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). His research interests include peace processes, peacebuilding, the dynamics of civil war, migration and transnational communities, and methodology in difficult contexts. Dr Harpviken has been a visiting researcher at the University of Chicago and Georgetown University, and he is an Associate at the University of York, the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and the Institute of National Security Studies Sri Lanka. He is known for his competence on Afghanistan and the surrounding region, but has also worked in Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iran, Mozambique, and Pakistan. Dr Harpviken is a frequently used media commentator, and lectures regularly to both academic and popular audiences. He is the author of Social Networks and Migration in Afghanistan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and (with Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh), A Rock between Hard Places: Afghanistan as an Arena for Regional Insecurity (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2016).

Nadeem Farooq Paracha

Nadeem Farooq Paracha is a Pakistani journalist, author and cultural critic. He is a regular columnist for DAWN, where he writes under the title Smoker’s Corner. Paracha attained his education from Karachi Grammar School and Karachi University. He is the author of “End of the Past”, “The Pakistan Anti-Hero”, “Points of Entry” and “Muslim Modernism: A Case of Naya Pakistan”. Paracha is also a Research Scholar and Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the International Forum for Democratic Studies in Washington DC.

Adam Kotsko

Adam Kotsko is on the faculty of the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College near Chicago, where he teaches widely in the humanities and social sciences. His research focuses on political theology, continental philosophy, and the history of Christian thought. He is the author, most recently, of The Prince of This World, a study of the political legacy of pre-modern Christian ideas about the devil, and Neoliberalism’s Demons, which argues that the contemporary political-economic order functions on the basis of a logic of moral entrapment that echoes the theological concept of demonization.

Nida Kirmani

Nida Kirmani is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. She is also Faculty Director of the Saida Waheed Gender Initiative. Nida has published widely on issues related to gender, Islam, women’s movements, development and urban studies in India and Pakistan. She completed her PhD in 2007 from the University of Manchester in Sociology. Her book, Questioning ‘the Muslim Woman’: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality, was published in 2013 by Routledge. Her current research focuses on urban violence, gender and insecurity in the area of Lyari in Karachi.

Flagg Miller

Flagg Miller is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California at Davis.  Trained as a linguistic anthropologist, Dr. Miller’s research focuses on cultures of modern Muslim reform in the Middle East and especially Yemen.  His latest book is entitled The Audacious Ascetic: What the Bin Laden Tapes Reveal about Al-Qa`ida. His first book, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen (2007), examined how Yemenis have used traditional poetry and new media technologies to envision a productive relationship between tribalism and progressive Muslim reform.  Along with publications in a variety of professional journals including the American Ethnologist, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of Language and Communication, and the Journal of Women’s History, Dr. Miller has written the preface to Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak (University of Iowa Press, 2007), a collection of translated poems written by detainees at Guantánamo Bay.  

Mr Fakir Syed Aijazuddin

Mr Fakir Syed Aijazuddin has taught at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and at FCC University, Lahore and served as Principal at Aitchison College. He served as Minister for Culture, Tourism and Environment in the interim Punjab Cabinet from November 2007 to April 2008. Since 1994, he has been the Honorary British Consul for the United Kingdom at Lahore, in recognition of which he was awarded the OBE in 1997. He was also the Chairman, Executive Committee of the Lahore Museum, an International Councillor of the Asia Society (New York) and the Country Representative for Asia House, London, and a Fellow of the National College of Arts, Lahore. He is the author of “Sketches from a Howdah”, “The Fickle 70s”, “The Morning After”, “From a Minister’s Journal” and “The Resourceful Fakirs”.

Lucy Inglis

Lucy Inglis is an eighteenth-century historian and curator of the award-winning Georgian London blog. She is a novelist, a speaker, and occasionally a television presenter and voice in the radio. She is the creator of the Georgian London blog and her book of the same name was shortlisted for the History Today Longman Prize. City of Halves, her first novel for young adults, was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the Branford Boase award and her second Crow Mountain was published in 2015. She lives in London.

Christian Wolmar

Christian Wolmar is a Labour politician, writer and broadcaster specialising in transport. He has spent nearly all of his working life as a journalist.
Christian has become one of the UK’s leading commentators on transport matters and has won several awards for his work. His books include Stagecoach (1999), The Great British Railway Disaster (1997), and On the Wrong Line.
He has written two books on the London Underground, Down the Tube, published in 2002, and The Subterranean Railway, published in 2004. His next book, Fire and Steam, was published by Atlantic Books in 2006. It was the first history of the railways to be published for many years. Subsequently, he has written Blood, Iron and Gold an examination of the way that railways affected economic development and Engines of War, looking at the impact of railways on warfare.
He is a member of the board of Cycling England, and on the board of trustees of the Railway Children, a charity which helps homeless and destitute children at stations home and abroad.

Joseph Massad

Joseph Massad teaches and writes about modern Arab politics and intellectual history. He has a particular interest in theories of identity and culture – including theories of nationalism, sexuality, race and religion. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1998. He is the author of Desiring Arabs [2007], which was awarded the Lionel Trilling Book Award; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinian Question [2006]; and Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan [2001]. His book Daymumat al-Mas’alah al-Filastiniyyah was published by Dar Al-Adab in 2009, and La persistence de la question palestinienne was published by La Fabrique in 2009. His articles have appeared in Public Culture, Interventions, Middle East Journal, Psychoanalysis and History, Critique, and the Journal of Palestine Studies, and used to write frequently for Al-Ahram Weekly. He teaches courses in Columbia University on modern Arab culture, psychoanalysis in relation to civilisation and identity, gender and sexuality in the Arab world, and Palestinian-Israeli politics and society, with seminars on Nationalism in the Middle East as Idea and Practice, and also on Orientalism and Islam.

Goolam Vahed

Goolam Vahed completed his studies in South Africa and the US and teaches history at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and has published work on the Indian diaspora, Islam, and the role of sport and culture in South African society. His previous publications include Blacks in Whites: A Century of Sporting Struggles in KwaZulu-Natal, 1880–2002 and Inside Indenture: A South African Story, 1860–1914. He also co-edited Empire & Cricket: The South African Experience 1884-1914. He has immediate family in two continents and appreciates the importance of letter writing.

Ali Gibran Siddiqui

Ali Gibran Siddiqui did his bachelors from LUMS and earned a doctorate in History from Ohio State University. He teaches courses in South Asian studies and Sufism, and is Program Director and Assistant Professor at IBA, Karachi.

Ali Arqam

Ali Arqam is a Karachi based journalist and researcher. He teaches Pashto at Habib University, and writes for Pakistan Today, The Nation, Newsline, DAWN and The News. He is an Urdu contributor for Sujaag. His main area is Karachi’s security, law and order.

Palvashay Sethi

Palvashay Sethi is a lecturer and literary critic, based in Karachi. She did her Masters from University of Edinburgh and University of Essex and her interests include literature and modernity. She was a teaching Instructor at Bahria University, Script Writer at Talking Filmain. Currently, she teaches at IBA. She also contributes for newspapers and magazines. Her writing by the name of “Kalaam e Haibat” has also been featured in The Aleph Review.

Ayesha Khan

Ayesha Khan has been part of the Collective as a Senior Researcher since 2001. Her work covers gender and development, social policy and conflict/refugee issues in the region.
Her book The Women’s Movement in Pakistan: Activism, Islam and Democracy, will be published by I.B. Tauris in 2018. She was a Visiting Scholar in fall 2016 at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies at Oxford University. Her current research with the Collective is with Action for Empowerment and Accountability. She is conducting a study on women’s collective action for political expression in Pakistan. She has served on the governing bodies of leading non-governmental organizations working on women’s issues, and participated in advocacy-related task forces to influence government policy. Ayesha has also worked as a journalist in international radio, local television, newspapers and magazines.

Ayesha Khan

Marvi Mazhar graduated from the Indus Valley School of Architecture (IVSAA) and after completing her masters from the University of Turin, Italy, in 2013 she established her own architecture and design studio, Marvi Mazhar & Associates. Marvi Mazhar served as Director at PeaceNiche (T2F), and is the co-founder of (ADRL) The Architectural Design Research Lab, housed within, and affiliated with, the Department of Architecture at the Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture. In 2016, Mazhar founded Pakistan Chowk Community Centre and became an appointed member of the Lahore Conservation Society, Karachi Biennale 2017 (Outreach Committee), Secretary to South Asia Foundation (SAF-Pakistan) & ICCOMOS. She was the Project Manager of National History Museum (Lahore, Pakistan), conceptualized by The Citizens Archive of Pakistan. In 2018 she has been appointed as adviser to the Minister for Federal Education and Professional Training, and National History & Literary Heritage Division.

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Muneeza Shamsie

Muneeza Shamsie is the author of a literary history ‘Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English’ and is Managing Editor of a work-in-progress ‘The Oxford Companion to the Literatures of Pakistan’. She has edited three anthologies of Pakistani English Literature including ‘And The World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women’.
She is the Bibliographic Representative (Pakistan) for The Journal of Commonwealth Literature.
She is also on the International Advisory Board for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and was a member of its 2013 judging panel. She has served as the regional judge (Europe and South Asia) for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (2010 and 2011).
. She contributes regularly to The Literary Encyclopedia and in Pakistan to the newspaper Dawn and the periodical Newsline. Her memoir essays have appeared in various publications. She was born in Lahore, educated in England and lives in Karachi.

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Dr. Faiza Mushtaq

Dr. Faiza Mushtaq is a sociologist and teacher based in Karachi. She completed her education from McGill and Northwestern University in sociology. Currently, she is Assistant Professor at IBA, Karachi where she heads the School of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts. She has also taught at LUMS and George Washington University.

Dr. Asma Abbas

Dr. Asma Abbas earned her doctorate from Pennsylvania State University, and is a transdisciplinary political theorist. She was born and raised in Karachi. She has previously served as Division Head for Social Studies, Faculty Convener of the Simon’s Rock Study Group on Institutional Transition and Mission, and is the founding member and coordinator of the Proseminar in Humanistic and Social Scientific Inquiry. Her writing has been published in several edited volumes, and in journals. Dr. Abbas has been teaching at Simon’s Rock since 2005. She is Affiliate faculty at Union Institute and University’s Social Justice Ph.D. Program and Associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is the author of “Liberalism and Human Suffering”.

Farrukh Iqbal

Farrukh Iqbal has had more than thirty years of research and management experience in the World Bank across a diverse range of countries and sectors.  Among countries, he has worked on Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, China, Iran, Egypt, and the GCC.  Among sectors, he has worked and published on various aspects of economic development including growth, poverty, small and medium enterprises, trade and foreign investment, health insurance, local government development, and political economy issues.  He holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a Ph. D. in economics from Yale University. Currently, he is the Dean at IBA, Karachi.

Nadeem ul Haque

Nadeem ul Haque is the former Deputy Chairman at Planning Commission, Government of Pakistan and former vice chancellor of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics.  He received his doctorate in economics from University of Chicago. He has a 22 year work experience with the IMF and led organizational reform and efforts for nationwide deregulation in Sri Lanka. His expertise is in economics and urban studies. He is the author of 2 books and multiple research papers.

Ashraf Jehangir Qazi

Ashraf Jehangir Qazi is a Pakistani politician. He has held several national and international appointments as a diplomat.  In 2004, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan named him as the head of the UN mission in Iraq. In 2007, Qazi was appointed as a special representative of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in Sudan. Between 2002 and 2004, Qazi was Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. Before that, he was Pakistan’s High Commissioner to India since 1997 and ambassador to Syria (1986–88), East Germany (1990–91), Russia (1991–94), and later to China (1994–97). While at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Islamabad, he served as director of East Asia (1975–1978), director-general for Policy Planning, Afghanistan (1982–1986) and Additional Foreign Secretary for Policy Planning, Afghanistan, Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (1988–1990). 

Asma Shirazi

Asma Shirazi is a Pakistani journalist and political commentator who hosts a primetime current-affairs show on Aaj News. Asma Shirazi has also reported from the front on numerous conflicts that include the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, Taliban violence on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in 2009 as well as the state of emergency announced by General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan in 2007. Previously, she has worked on Samaa TV, GEO News and later on ARY News BOL News, Dawn News, Express News. Ms Shirazi is the first Pakistani journalist to win the prestigious Peter Mackler Award for Courageous and Ethical Journalism.

Usman Qasmi

Usman Qasmi is Assistant Professor (History) at the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law since January 2012. He received his PhD from the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University in March 2009. Before joining LUMS, he was a Newton Fellow for Post Doctoral research at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He has published extensively in reputed academic journals such as Modern Asian Studies, The Muslim World and The Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies. He has recently published a monograph titled Questioning the Authority of the Past: The Ahl al-Qur’an Movements in the Punjab. Besides these, he has co-edited a volume on Muhammad Iqbal titled Revisioning Iqbal as a Poet and Muslim Political Thinker. Dr. Qasmi is also a visiting research fellow in History at the Royal Holloway College, University of London.

Imtiaz Gul

Imtiaz Gul is Editor, Strategic Affairs, and also heads the independent Centre for Research and Security Studies, Islamabad. He is the author of “The Al-Qaeda Connection – Taliban and Terror in Tribal Areas”, “The Unholy Nexus; Pak-Afghan relations under the Taliban”, “Pakistan: Before and After Osama bin Laden”, and “The Most Dangerous Place – Pakistan’s Lawless Frontier”. Besides offering advice as consultant to foreign diplomatic missions and development sector organizations, Gul regularly appears as an analyst / expert on Pakistani TV channels as well as the Doha-based Al-Jazeera English/Arabic satellite TV channel for his expertise in areas such as Afghanistan/Tribal Areas / and the Kashmir militancy.

Salman Rashid

Salman Rashid is Pakistan’s most widely travelled travel writer with few places in the country that do not carry his footprint. Acclaimed as ‘the most erudite travel writer of the country’, he is the author of eight books that include anthologies of his newspaper articles. His works include “Jhelum: City of the Vitasta”, “The Apricot Road to Yarkand”, “Sea Monsters and the Sun god”, “Gujranwala, the glory that was”, “The Salt Range and the Potohar Plateau”, “Deosai: Land of the Giant”, “Prisoner on a Bus”, “A Time of Madness” and “Riders on the Win”. He is also the fellow of Royal Geographical Society.

Owais Tohid

With 24 years of journalistic experience, Owais Tohid has headed three of Pakistan’s private television channels, ARY, Geo (E) and Dunya. His news management and editorial expertise draws strength from his reporting experience, in which he has covered conflicts in Israel, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka . He has also reported from the tribal belt along Pak-Afghan border and Afghanistan both pre and post 9/11. He worked for the BBC in London and was Pakistan/Afghanistan correspondent of US-based newspaper Christian Science Monitor. He has been Bureau Chief of Agence France Presse (AFP) in Karachi and has written for Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and The Guardian, among others. He has also headed PTV World and trained around 400 media staff in various capacities. 

Sara Malkani

Sara Malkani is a lawyer based in Karachi. She completed her education from Oxford University, Princeton and Michigan. She is Advocacy Adviser, Asia at the Centre for Reproductive Rights. She especially works on gender, human rights and sexual harassment issues.

Syed Fahd Husain

Syed Fahd Husain is a renowned news media professional with over 25 years of experience in journalism. Over the years, Fahd has held various important positions in the news media industry. He presently wears two hats – as Editor of the Express Tribune and as Executive Director of Express News Television.

Nusrat Javed

Nusrat Javed is a Pakistani columnist, journalist and news anchor. He has written for all leading newspapers of the country during his career. He has also hosted TV shows like Bolta Pakistan and Dunya Mere Agay.