DOHA – The Qatar Foundation will provide funding support for three endowed professorships at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA. The new professorships will be named after the Emir of Qatar, His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani.
The three Northwestern University professorships – in the areas of journalism, communication, and Middle East studies – reflect the vision of Qatar Foundation to partner with institutions of academic excellence, such as Northwestern University, to build a knowledge-based society in Qatar and unlock human potential.
Hamid Naficy, a professor from Northwestern University’s Evanston, Illinois, campus who is currently teaching at Northwestern’s campus in Qatar, is the recipient of one of the professorships. He has been named Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication.
“For many centuries, and throughout the world, endowed professorships have provided important support for colleges and universities. We very much appreciate the funding of these chairs by Qatar Foundation, which will enable Northwestern to enhance its programs in areas we have identified as high priorities for the university,” said Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro.
Naficy is a leading authority on cinema and television in the Middle East. Prof. Naficy has produced many educational films and experimental videos and has published extensively about theories of exile and displacement, exilic and diaspora cinema and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas.
His many publications include such well-known titles as An Accented Cinema, The Making of Exile Cultures, Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged, Iran Media Index, and the AFI anthology, Home, Exile, Homeland.
Also named to these new endowed professorial chairs are Frank Mulhern, professor and associate dean of research at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern’s Evanston campus, who has been named the Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the Medill School of Journalism and Carl Petry, professor of history in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences in Evanston, who has been named the Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Middle East Studies.
Mulhern conducts research on the impact of media technologies on marketing and media content and the changing business models for news and advertising. He has published numerous studies on marketing communications, econometric analysis of communications effects, media technology and the integration of communications across different audiences.
Petry specializes in the Islamic World and North Africa, medieval and modern Egypt and the social history of the Middle East. He is the author of “The Civilian Elite of Cairo in the Later Middle Ages,” a study based on biographies of 5,000 persons active in the administrative and scholastic communities of that city.
Northwestern University and Qatar Foundation have been partners since 2008, when Northwestern joined an elite cadre of world-class American universities that have established branch campuses at Qatar Foundation’s Education City.
Northwestern University in Qatar offers undergraduate degrees in Communication and Journalism. The Medill School’s Journalism program prepares students for careers in print, broadcast and online news media, while the School of Communication offers a major in Media Industries and Technologies, preparing students for management and creative roles in the communication and media industries, and for responsible civic participation in global media.
With liberal arts courses provided by Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Science, both of these programs replicate the quality of courses offered at Northwestern’s home campus in Evanston, and graduates of the Qatar branch campus are awarded the same degree as their counterparts in the U.S.
