Professor Scott Redford
SAOS University of London
Department of History of Art and Archaeology
He’s interested in investigating cultural boundaries between the different communities that shared the geographies and cultures of the areas that now constitute Turkey, the southern Caucasus, northern Mesopotamia, Syria, and Iran in the medieval period (11-14th cs CE). This entails a 'big tent' approach to material culture, including traditional art historical subjects, but also numismatics, epigraphy, ceramics, and other fields allied with archaeology, landscape studies, and the architecture and archaeology of travel. My research has been supported by grants from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Getty Foundation, the Barakat Trust, the van Berchem Foundation, the British Institute at Ankara, the British Council Cultural Preservation Fund and other organizations.
Dr. Hazel Rose Markus
Professor of Psychology
Standford University, USA
Hazel Rose Markus is the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the role of self in regulating behavior and on the ways in which the social world shapes the self. She investigates people as culturally-shaped shapers of their cultures, including those of nation or region of origin, gender, social class, race, ethnicity, and occupation.
Mr. Saud Alsanousi
(Arabic: سعود السنعوسي, born 27 May 1981) is a Kuwaiti novelist and journalist. His debut novel The Prisoner of Mirrors (2010) won the Leila Othman Prize. In 2011, his short story The Bonsai and the Old Man won a competition organized by Al-Arabi magazine and BBC Arabic. His novel The Bamboo Stalk, written from the perspective of a boy of mixed Kuwaiti-Filipino parentage about his struggle to find a place in either country, won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (2013). Saud Alsanousi lives in Kuwait and writes for the Al-Qabas newspaper. Contributing to Panel: Historical Fiction.
Ms. Jokha Alharthi
(Arabic: جوخة الحارثي), also spelt al-Harthi, is an Omani writer and academic, known for winning the Man Booker International Prize in 2019 for her novel Sayyidat al-Qamar (Arabic: سيدات القمر), published in English under the title Celestial Bodies. Alharthi is the first Arab author to win the Man Booker International Prize. She has written four novels in Arabic, two of which have been translated into English.
Ms. Leila Fuad Aboulela FRSL
(Arabic:ليلى فؤاد ابوالعلا; born 1964) is a fiction writer, essayist, and playwright of Sudanese origin
based in Aberdeen, Scotland. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and moved to Scotland in 1990 where she began her literary career. Until 2023, Aboulela has published six novels and several short stories, which have been translated into fifteen languages. Her most popular novels, Minaret (2005) and The Translator (1999) both feature the stories of Muslim women in the UK and were longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and Orange Prize. Aboulela’s works have been included in publications such as Harper's Magazine, Granta, The Washington Post and The Guardian. BBC Radio has adapted her work extensively and broadcast a number of her plays, including The Insider, The Mystic Life and the historical drama The Lion of Chechnya. The five-part radio serialization of her 1999 novel The Translator was short-listed for the Race In the Media Award (RIMA).
Ms. Raja'a Alem 
(Arabic: رجاء عالم) (born in 1970) is a Saudi Arabian novelist from Mecca/Hejaz.
Professor Scott Redford
Scott Redford is Nasser D. Khalili Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology at SOAS, University of London. He has participated in archaeological excavations and/or surveys in Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt and the UAE over the past four decades. His area of specialization is the medieval period, roughly the 11-14th centuries, in SW Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. In addition to the United Kingdom, he has also taught in the United States and in Turkey.
