The Odyssey: From Homer to Nolan

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey brings Homer’s ancient Greek epic to the big screen. Join us for a discussion of the film as an adaptation, viewed through a gender lens. The panel will look at how the story’s women, such as Penelope, Circe and Calypso, are portrayed on screen. It will also ask what the adaptation keeps from the epic, what it changes, and what those choices say about gender, power and storytelling. Our panelists bring perspectives from filmmaking, literary criticism and feminist theory.

Maggie Morgan
An Egyptian filmmaker, festival programmer and educator. Her films, including From Within Their Stories, Asham, From Meir to Meir and, most recently, The Memoirs of M.A. Draz, have been widely screened in Egypt and internationally. She has taught and mentored emerging filmmakers in various roles, most recently with Les Ateliers de Dahchouria, whose films will soon screen at Festival Cinemed Montpellier 2026.
 

Hala Kamal
Professor of English and Gender Studies at Cairo University and adjunct in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at AUC. Her research and publications, in both English and Arabic, focus on women and gender studies, feminist literary criticism, comparative literature and translation studies.
 

Moderator:

Merna Aboul-Ezz
An adjunct faculty member at the Cynthia Nelson Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies (IGWS). She holds a PhD in international law from the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research focuses on feminist legal theory, gender, human rights and the intersections of religion and gender, with particular attention to Muslim women’s rights and agency.

Public and Community Events | View More Events

School of Humanities and Social Sciences