Josh Rosenthal Education Fund Lecture
Who: Arab scholar Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi
When: 4 p.m. Sept. 21
Where: Annenberg Auditorium
Time magazine says he’s “shaping the conversation” as changes unfold in the Middle East. NPR says he “wrote the first draft of Middle East history in short sentences tapped out on his computer and his cell phone.”
He’s Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, a 33-year-old scholar, columnist and Twitter commentator who will give the 2011 Josh Rosenthal Education Fund Lecture at 4 p.m. Sept. 21. The talk, free and open to the public, is named after a 1979 U-M graduate who died in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Al-Qassemi’s lecture will focus on the sweeping changes in the Middle East. Apart from his influential Twitter commentary about the historic events, he has been writing about the subject for The Financial Times, The Huffington Post and The National, a newspaper in Abu Dhabi.
Al-Qassemi is a non-resident fellow at the Dubai School of Government, and he teaches Middle Eastern history and entrepreneurship as a lecturer at Dubai Men’s College. He received a master’s degree in global banking and finance from the European Business School and a bachelor of science in international business administration from the American University of Paris.
When he’s not teaching or tweeting, Al-Qassemi serves as the founder and chairman of Barjeel Securities, a financial products company. He also is the managing director of Al-Saud Co., Ltd., which specializes in equity markets, real estate and construction.
The lecture, to be delivered in Annenberg Auditorium in Weill Hall, is sponsored by the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy’s Josh Rosenthal Education Fund, which supports lectures, research and internships that encourage public discussion and greater understanding of changes in the world since the Sept. 11 attacks.
