Dr. Amal Mohammed Al-Malki, PhD

Dr. Amal Al-Malki is a Qatari scholar, educator, public speaker, social commentator and advocate of women’s rights and gender equality. Dr. Amal is the Founding Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar Foundation. Prior to that, she was the Executive Director of the Translation and Interpreting Institute, for which she was recruited by Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, Chairperson of Qatar Foundation, to establish in 2011.

Dr. Al-Malki holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of London – SOAS, where she also earned a Master’s degree in English-Arabic Applied Linguistics and Translation. Dr. Al-Malki was the youngest PhD holder upon obtaining her PhD degree in 2003. She joined the faculty in Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q) in 2005 as an Assistant Professor after spending 6 months teaching in the mother campus in Pittsburgh, a challenge that she accepted. Having the chance to be hired in one of the local universities in Qatar, Dr. Al-Malki opted to take the extra mile and to prove her ability to compete on an international level. Dr. Al-Malki became the first Qatari faculty to teach at Education City at large, and the only one in Qatar Foundation for 11 years.

In 2012, Dr. Amal published her book titled Arab Women in Arab News: Old Stereotypes and New Media (Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation and Bloomsbury Academic, UK), which was lauded as the first comprehensive study of the topic in the world. She was promoted to Associate Professor by CMU-Q in 2013, and given a public service leave to run the Translation and Interpreting Institute. She taught in CMU-Q courses in writing composition, postcolonial literature, theories of translation and Islamic feminism. Dr. Al-Malki’s research interests include the negotiation of identity between East and West, media representations of Arab women and postcolonial literature.

Dr. Al-Malki has been invited to speak at conferences and forums throughout the Middle East, United States and UK. She was the first Arab and Muslim Keynote Speaker at City University in New York after 9/11. She was also the first Qatari to be invited to speak at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Durham Bookfair, SOAS and Maryland University among others. Focusing on women’s rights and Arab identity, she was recognized as a Qatar Foundation achiever in 2010 and has been profiled in several local and international magazines. She was an honored guest at the first Middle Eastern meeting of the Active Leaders for Women’s Advancement in the Near East (ALWANE) Coalition, an initiative by Women’s Campaign International (WCI), which advocates for gender equality around the world. Selected by the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs in Paris as “Personnalite d’Avenir Genre”- Future personality for Gender Equality” from Qatar. She was also selected to take part in several prestigious and exclusive programs, such as the Future Leader Program in 2014 in France by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Georgetown’s Leadership Seminar in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Al-Malki is a sought-after public speaker and social commentator. She strives to help deepen international understanding of Qatar and its evolving place in the world. Dr. Al-Malki’s work aims towards deconstructing the outdated discourses about Arab women, and therefore reconstructing the physical and virtual spaces to include women and embrace women’s experiences and contributions. She dedicates her academic and research agendas to researching and writing about women spaces and voices and building experiences (social or academic) and making them available to women, as the optimal route toward women empowerment. She writes and lectures about diversity and equity in higher education—an area she is deeply passionate about.A powerhouse in Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, Dr. Al-Malki is famous for creating spaces for discussions and multiple formats of dialoguing to forward the debate over feminism and women’s rights in Qatar, GCC and the Middle East. As a mentor, she has helped with the setting of Qatari Women Engineers Association (2022) through negotiating its establishment as a branch of Qatar Society of Engineers Engineering Society. She mentored multiple women initiatives in Qatar and Education City, for example “The Future is Female” initiative by the Women Club in Georgetown University in Qatar, which she has been mentoring since 2018. She has also co-organized political training for Qatari women running for the first Shura Council elections in 2021 in collaboration with the European Delegation to Kuwait and Qatar.

In 2020, she launched the “Women of the Middle East Podcast” as the first feminist narrative by a Qatari scholar, covering women of the middle east and building new areas of knowledge and activism that will enable women to be heard.

Sub-specialties:
Arab Women representation in Media.
Postcolonial Novels.
Identity Politics.