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

Zahid Hussain
Zahid Hussain is an

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

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

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

Christian Wolmar
Christian Wolmar is a Labour politician, writer
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
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

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

Ali Arqam
Ali Arqam is a Karachi based journalist and researcher. He teaches Pashto at Habib

Palvashay Sethi
Palvashay Sethi is a lecturer and literary critic, based in Karachi. She did her Masters from

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

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
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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

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.

Usman Qasmi
Usman Qasmi is Assistant Professor (History) at the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law since January 2012. He received his

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

Salman Rashid
Salman Rashid is Pakistan’s most widely

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

Sara Malkani
Sara Malkani is a lawyer based in Karachi. She completed her education from Oxford University, Princeton and Michigan. She is

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.
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