Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi (سلطان سعود القاسمي) is an Emirati columnist and researcher on social, political and cultural affairs in the Arab Gulf States whose articles have appeared in The Financial Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Open Democracy, The National, and The Globe and Mail, as well as other notable publications.
Sultan’s tweets became a major news source during the Arab Spring, rivaling the major news networks at the time, until TIME magazine listed him in the “140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2011.” In 2018 Sultan ranked 19th on the “Arabic Thought Leader Index” by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute.
Sultan was a practitioner-in-residence at the Hagop Kevorkian Center of Near East Studies at New York University in the Spring of 2017, a 2018 Yale Greenberg World Fellow, a lecturer at the Council of Middle East Studies in Yale University and then an Adjunct Instructor at the Center of Contemporary Arab Studies in Georgetown University in 2019, a Visiting Instructor at the Islamic Civilization & Societies Program in Boston College and then a Senior Lecturer at the Art History and Fine Arts department in The American University of Paris in 2020. In Spring 2021, he taught at the Islamic Civilization & Societies Program in Boston College as well as the School of Public Affairs at SciencesPo, Paris.
Sultan is also the founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation, an independent initiative established in 2010 to contribute to the intellectual development of the art scene in the Arab region by building a prominent and publicly accessible art collection in the United Arab Emirates. In 2018, 100 works from the collection were hosted on a long-term basis at the Sharjah Art Museum.
Sultan is currently teaching his course “Politics of Modern Middle Eastern Art” at Brandeis University and has joined the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) community this semester as Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar with the Middle East Initiative at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
His certifications include a 2006 Sharjah Scientific & Cultural Association Recognition Award, as well as the Middle East Leadership Initiative Certificate of Graduation awarded by Aspen Institute in May 2018.
Sultan maintains a vibrant social media presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, and Blogspot. He is featured on Wikipedia, and a screenshot of his page can be found here. This is his official website.
Screenshots of all website links in this bio can be downloaded here.