Qatar Museums launches season one of ‘Lusail Museum Conversations’

Doha, Qatar: Qatar Museums has announced the launch of the Lusail Museum Conversations, an ongoing series of public lectures and events. The inaugu...

Doha, Qatar: Qatar Museums has announced the launch of the Lusail Museum Conversations, an ongoing series of public lectures and events.

The inaugural season, titled The Late Ottoman World: At the Roots of the Modern Middle East, runs from January to April 2026 and will take place at Georgetown University in Qatar. Across five in-depth talks, the series examines questions of authority, artistic expression, reform, and belonging during the nineteenth century, revealing the foundations of many dynamics that continue to shape the region today. This is the first of a longer cycle of thematic seasons.

Designed as a platform for dialogue, scholarship, and cultural exchange, the programme invites audiences to explore, with leading speakers, the cities, stories, and figures of the nineteenth-century Middle East and beyond.

Through conversations led by internationally recognised historians and cultural figures who are also acclaimed storytellers, audiences will learn unexpected stories about late Ottoman culture and the roots of the modern Middle Eastern, discovering how people negotiated the challenges and appeal of European modernity in a world rooted in its own history.

The inaugural season brings together five lectures and a film screening, each delving into key aspects of the late Ottoman world. From exploring the intersections of art, authority, and reform, to questions of identity and cultural exchange, the talks examine how pivotal figures and events shaped the cultural and artistic landscapes of the nineteenth-century Middle East. Audiences will gain insight into palace culture, diplomacy, the experiences of imperial elites, the contributions of women artists, and the legacies of memory and migration in the region.