Nagwan is Nonresidential Scholar fellow at Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security at Georgetown University. Previously she was a Senior Fellow at the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Services and a scholar fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Nagwan received her Ph.D. in social and political sciences from the European University Institute in Italy and her master’s in political science from Cairo University. She was a doctoral visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, a doctoral fellow of the Middle East Directions Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, and a visiting fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Freie Universität Berlin, and the University of Amsterdam. Nagwan was also chairperson of the Regional Center for Mediation and Dialogue in Egypt, a former grantee, and a project manager at the Institut Religioscope, in Fribourg, Switzerland.
Nagwan has also served as a regional trainer in conflict and peace studies, training activists from Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Oman, and Turkey. She has contributed to designing Early Warning and Rapid Response networks (EWRR) and dialogue processes in many counties in the MENA region. In addition, she has served as a consultant to organizations such as the Institut Religioscope in Switzerland and shared her experiences in dealing with sectarian tensions and designing dialogue processes in a post-conflict era with the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNIMK).