Director of the Lusail Institute Professor Alain Fouad George (third right); and historian and Sakıp Sabancı Visiting Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University Edhem Eldem (fourth right) with participants at the Lusail Museum Conversations launch event yesterday. Pics by Mohamed Attar/The Peninsula.
Doha, Qatar: Qatar Museums, in collaboration with Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q), yesterday launched the Lusail Museum Conversations, and the first season of the series will explore lesser-known stories from the late Ottoman period and how they shaped the modern Middle East region.
The event held at the GU-Q also marked the public launch of the upcoming Lusail Museum’s academic arm, Lusail Institute, an advanced research centre that produces knowledge to nourish the museum.
Lusail Museum Conversations Season 1, titled ‘The Late Ottoman World: At the Roots of the Modern Middle East,’ will be through April 2026 and host five in-depth talks focusing on 19th-century debates around power, art and identity that remain relevant today. Across the season, audiences will revisit the late Ottoman world as a period of cultural experimentation, focusing on representation, identity, and cross-cultural exchange.
The collaborative initiative between GU-Q and Qatar Museums is curated by Director of the Lusail Institute Professor Alain Fouad George, who is also a GU-Q Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence, as well as I.M. Pei Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Oxford.
“It’s my real pleasure to inaugurate the conversations, which also mark the public launch of the Lusail Institute. Lusail Institute is the research arm of Lusail Museum. It’s a new institution that’s being created by Qatar Museums, under the leadership of H E Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani,” said Professor George.
Dean of GU-Q Safwan Masri addressing the event.
“The Lusail Museum Conversations will be a cycle of public events organised into seasons of about three months each and thematically arranged. The aim is to bring you, here in Doha, some of the most interesting historians, artists and thinkers, in order to explore periods and words that may be little known to us, but that actually resonate with our lives,” he said.
“The Lusail Institute is first and foremost an advanced research centre that produces knowledge to nourish the Museum, and that also contributes to international scholarships. This involves working with an international network of academic partners, the most important of which is Georgetown University in Qatar,” said Professor George.
Dean of GU-Q Safwan Masri underlined the academic and cultural significance of the Lusail Museum Conversations and Lusail Institute.
“This series is designed as a space for serious scholarship and public dialogue, and it invites us to look carefully at moments of transition, to understand how society will respond when inherited structures no longer suffice and new possibilities begin to emerge,” he said.
“But The Lusail Museum Conversations is also something more. It is an early expression of the vision behind the Lusail Museum, Qatar Museum’s forthcoming landmark institution, scheduled to open in 2029,” said Dean Masri, adding that these conversations activate the museum’s intellectual life even before its doors open.
Beyond its galleries, the Lusail Museum aims to serve as a space for ideas, research and public dialogue.
“Central to this mission is the Lusail Institute, the museum’s research arm,” said Dean Safwan, who is also chair of the Lusail Institute’s advisory committee.
The inaugural lecture of the Lusail Museum Conversations titled Princes, Patrons, and Painters: The Ottoman Palace and the Challenge of Modernity by historian and Sakıp Sabancı Visiting Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University Edhem Eldem. He discussed the artworks of the last Ottoman caliph, Abdülmecid. It examined how his art reflected ideas of modernity after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, highlighting the contradictions of Ottoman modernisation and the cultural role of imperial figures.
“You may have noticed that there’s an attempt at alliteration to talk about modernity at the top of the Ottoman hierarchy,” Eldem said, noting that Ottoman princes were “probably the last to modernise, or those who had the least access to one of the most essential elements of modernity… public visibility.”
Abdülmecid, he explained, stood out as a rare exception. “Abdülmecid Efendi… is probably the only prince that managed this transition from a rather closed, opaque environment into the public space of the time, using his art… to fashion himself as an intellectual and, in some ways, as a revolutionary.”
The next lecture of the Lusail Museum Conversations, scheduled for January 27, titled ‘At the Empire’s Edge: Art, Authority, and Reform in Nineteenth-Century Tunis’, will examine how Tunisia’s rulers used art and ceremony to project reform and modern statehood in the nineteenth century.
