NYUAD Institute

2019.10.02 Born into a family of artists, Arn grew up in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. He spent his youth in a child labor camp, forced to play propaganda music, before being adopted and raised in the US. He returned to Cambodia on a mission: to unearth his family’s legacy and to find his former music teacher and the stars of his childhood. On this trip, Cambodian Living Arts (CLA) was b...

2019.10.07 The digitization of early modern England’s print culture has reignited the quest to locate Shakespeare's missing presence. Scholars once searched out lost manuscripts; now computational analysis promises to identify signature features "encoded in the text," as Peter Kirwan puts it. This talk addresses what happens when we use digital affordances to read Shakespeare in the opposite direc...

2019.10.09 Ras Al Khaimah is an emirate of superheroes: captains who survived shipwrecks, shipbuilders who survived lightning strikes, honey collectors who scaled mountains, and entrepreneurs who made a strange land home. This talk shares the stories behind the photo book "People of Ras Al Khaimah," a collection of the personal histories of more than 50 long-term residents and Emiratis. Through it...

2019.10.23 Ishmael Beah was recruited as a child soldier to fight in the Sierra Leone Civil War when he was thirteen years old. This talk explores how he survived the brutality of the war to become the renowned author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and UNICEF’s First Advocate for Children Affected by War in 2007. The Washington Post writes that “Everyone in the world should read [Bea...

11.04.2019 A Career In Public Service From President Carter To President Obama During a decade and a half of public service in four U.S. administrations, Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat discusses his career in politics and law and his new book "President Carter: The White House Years" (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018). Speakers Stuart E. Eizenstat, Former United States Ambassador to the European Union; Au...

15.04.2019 Building Oil Pasts And Futures- The Norwegian Petroleum Museum Norway struck oil in 1969 with the discovery of the giant Ekofisk oil field in the North Sea, and during the last 50 years Norway has developed an advanced offshore oil and gas industry. The activities and income from the industry have made a big impact on Norwegian society. Since 1996 the state revenue has been transferred...

01.05.2019 Seeing The World How US Universities Make Knowledge In A Global Era U.S. research universities have long endeavored to be cosmopolitan places, yet the disciplines of economics, political science, and sociology have remained stubbornly parochial. Despite decades of government and philanthropic investment in international scholarship, the most prestigious academic departments still favor...

08.04.2019 Optical Tweezers Shedding Light On Life’s Molecules, One At A Time Recent advances have led to the new field of single molecule biophysics. Single-molecule techniques record characteristics that are otherwise obscured by traditional approaches, revealing the behavior of individual biomolecules. Prominent among the new techniques is ‘optical tweezers,’ which uses radiation pressure from...

10.04.2019 Gender And Globalization In Contemporary Visual Art This program features the work of renowned feminist visual artist Shahzia Sikander. As an artist that hails from the Pakistani diaspora, Sikander’s work engages multiple national and transnational frames simultaneously, drawing attention to the imbrication of race, class, gender, and religion. The artist’s talk is followed by a panel d...

15.04.2019 Building Oil Pasts And Futures- The Norwegian Petroleum Museum Norway struck oil in 1969 with the discovery of the giant Ekofisk oil field in the North Sea, and during the last 50 years Norway has developed an advanced offshore oil and gas industry. The activities and income from the industry have made a big impact on Norwegian society. Since 1996 the state revenue has been transferred...

24.04.2019 Making Sense Of A Changing World: Poetry And Music In Contexts Of Political Instability Professor Kelly Askew, a renown anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, explores how music and poetry can offer opportunities for ordinary people to navigate, make sense, and negotiate moments of political transitions. This talk includes video-clips, poems, and insights from her anthropological re...

29.04.03 Eating Animals How much do people know about the food that's on their plates? Based on the bestselling book by Jonathan Safran Foer and narrated by co-producer Natalie Portman, Eating Animals is an urgent, eye-opening look at the environmental, economic, and public health consequences of factory farming. Tracing the history of food production in the United States, the film charts how farm...

2019.04.01 Are We The Same Or Different: Ethnicity And Personality In The Human Face? As a social species, humans are drawn naturally to differentiate people on many different dimensions, such as identity, sex, age, ethnicity, emotion, and personality. This talk aims to review the science on face processing, and pay attention to two specific issues: (1) Why do faces of ethnicities different from o...

2019.03.25 Will Syrians ever find home again or are we destined to forever settle in the plight of resettlement? Must we finally let go of home in order to belong once more? For millions of displaced Syrians around the world, home prevails somewhere between fading memories and fragile dreams. In the aftermath of despair, the idea of home stretches beyond stone walls and ancient countries. Home rec...

March 12, 2019 Inspired by the celebrated aphorism, “Know Thyself!”, which was inscribed on the forecourt at the temple of Apollo at Delphi, Socrates admonished his followers that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” In a similar vein, the Buddha famously urged his disciples to “Be a lamp unto yourself”. What does it mean to take these maxims seriously today, when the natural and mind scienc...

03.04.2019 The presentation exposes and explains a literary and social phenomenon when regular people from all walks of life took up the pen and wrote history in a language that mixed in their own colloquial dialects and oral literary forms. The authorship of chronicles had been the exclusive purview of the scholars (the`ulamā') who recorded events related to their interests and concerns in high A...

03.06.2019 Who are you?—Even a cursory take on this potent question reveals an important truth: your metaphysical commitments matter. What you take to be real about yourself and the world through which you move has immediate and profound consequences: what is the best life for you to live? What weight do your ethical claims have? This talk explores four powerful concepts of the self—Plato’s notion...

2019.02.21 The primary duty of a museum is to preserve heritage features of outstanding universal value for future generations. Preserving implies studying, understanding, and implementing conservation, but also communicating and engaging with the public in as many levels as possible. The connections and entangled relations between modern life and ancient artefacts move beyond the mutually exclusi...

2019.02.24 Drugs that address an unmet medical need have an enormous positive impact on society: introducing antibiotics and vaccines to common use in the middle 20th century shifted the life expectancy in the United States from 47 to 78 years and removed infectious disease as the major cause of death. Despite this enormous benefit, bringing new drugs to market remains arduous. Why is this the cas...

2019.02.19 What can the mapping of the human genome tell us about who we are? The twentieth century ended with the consensus in the social sciences and humanities that our group identities are constructed through social interaction rather than biologically determined. Does the mapping of the human genome in the twenty-first century challenge that consensus? This panel discussion brings together le...

The Taming Of The Plants 2019.02.04 Domestication is a co-evolutionary process that occurs when wild plants are brought into cultivation by humans starting about 12,000 years ago, leading to the origin of new species that we depend on for our food and clothing. How did humans accomplish this? How do crop plants evolve to adapt to humans and new environments? What genes are important for crops to a...

Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think 2019.02.06 Feeling Smart (Perseus Books Group, 2015) deals with the relationship between our emotional being and our rational one, and the implications of this relationship to areas such as economics, business, romance and the social interactions. This talk addresses the following questions: Are emotions and rationality two separate systems? Can we...

Abu Dhabi And The City Of The Future 2019.02.11 Photographer Andrew Moore presents his images of Abu Dhabi in the context of other cities around the world that he has shot and done projects on. In particular, Moore's talk focuses on how the principles of intelligent urban design apply to these different cities and the lessons learned from both good and bad examples of architecture and city plannin...

Islands Of Heritage Conservation And Transformation In Soqotra 2019.02.13 Soqotra, the largest island of Yemen’s Soqotra Archipelago, is one of the most biologically diverse places in the world. A UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, the island is home not only to birds, reptiles, and plants found nowhere else on earth, but also to a rich cultural history and the endangered Soqotri language. Within...

SocioEconomic Challenges Public Policy In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence 2019.02.17 The artificial intelligence/data revolution will affect our lives in ways unrivaled by previous revolutions. While it will substantially raise our standards of living and improve our health, almost every labor market will be disrupted, leading to widespread concerns about the future of labor. Large platforms an...