Hegasy, Sonja

Sonja Hegasy is a German academic who is the guest professor for Postcolonial Studies at the Barenboim-Said Akademie (2019-2021), a private music academy in Berlin. Since 2008, she is Vice Director of the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO). She studied Arabic and Islamic Studies at the American University in Cairo, the Universities of Witten/Herdecke and Bochum, graduating from Columbia University in 1990 with a thesis on Violent Narratives – Narrative Violence. Her PhD on State, Public Sphere and Civil Society in Morocco was published in German in 1996. Her research and publications focus on modern Arab intellectual thought, civil society and social mobilisation, as well as the politics of memory in post-conflict societies. Sonja Hegasy has been active in introducing the work of contemporary Moroccan philosopher Mohamed Abed al-Jabiri in Germany. In 2016, she was a Fulbright Fellow at the City University of New York. She holds numerous honorary positions on academic advisory councils, including chairing the Advisory Board for Science and Current Affairs of the Goethe-Institut in Munich from 2009 to 2016, and being a member of the Trajectories of Change program at the ZEIT-Stiftung.