Sonja Hegasy 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, and graduated from Columbia University in 1990 with a thesis “Violent Narratives – Narrative Violence.” Her Ph.D. “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 mobilization, as well as the politics of memory in post-conflict societies. In 2016, she was a Fulbright Fellow at the City University of New York. She holds numerous honorary positions on academic advisory councils, including the Trajectories of Change program at the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius and the Maghreb Studies Center of Arizona State University. From 2019 until 2021 she was the guest professor for Postcolonial Studies at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin.