Spring 2023
To contribute to the advancement of humankind through the creation of knowledge is a fundamental aspect of being a faculty member at a leading university like Northwestern. I am therefore pleased that the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, in collaboration with the Research Office and the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, is launching this newsletter to highlight our achievements as a community of evidence-based story tellers who use words, images, sound, and other modalities and platforms to gather, synthesize, and share knowledge in the classroom, the scholarly conference, the film festival, and public discourse writ large. I also hope that this newsletter will contribute to forging a culture of free inquiry and wide-ranging curiosity.
Northwestern in Qatar is a small but vibrant intellectual community, with faculty and students at the cutting edge of media studies and other evidence-based narrative production. This inaugural Research and Creative Scholarship Newsletter hopes to capture that excitement, sharing with both internal and external community members some of many accomplishments of the scholars among us. We thank the faculty for their voluntary submissions to this first Newsletter, and for their patience in case some submissions were not included due to time constraints and the difficulty of verifying some information. We hope to include further space for student and alumni accomplishments in future iterations. Subsequent Newsletters will appear every semester, with the aim to help communicate and take pride in the depth of scholarly production within our community.
Zachary Wright
Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs
Since launching in January of 2022, the Institute of Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (#IAS_NUQ) has undertaken several activities to enhance the research profile of NU-Q, while fulfilling its mission to produce and promote evidence-based storytelling focused on the histories, cultures, societies, and media of the Global South.
#IAS_NUQ has appointed and mentored a total of 27 Global Undergraduate Fellows to carry out individual research projects, 11 of whom have just presented their final projects to the NU-Q community, and 16 who are currently in the process of refining their projects, which will be carried out over the next year. Three of the 2022 fellows presented their research at the Global Fusion conference in Philadelphia in October and at least two have recently been admitted into competitive MA programs. The Institute has also hosted Sarah Parkinson, assistant professor of Political Science and International Studies at John Hopkins University and Jessica Winegar, professor of anthropology and Hamid Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Chair in Middle Eastern Studies at Northwestern University’s Evanston campus, as Global Faculty Affiliates. We also awarded a Global South Research Grant to Khaled Al-Hroub for this project The Arab Spring’s Islamists longue durée: A revisit of impact and futures.
In addition to supporting student and faculty research, #IAS_NUQ has hosted more than 20 public events in the last 14 months. These include ten well-attended virtual book talks, three Critical Conversations on the Global South, panel discussions on racial capitalism, internet shutdowns in Africa, sports in the Global South, and Global South comics, and two major conferences including an inaugural conference on the notion of the Global South as well as the recent “Southern Digitalities,” which gathered more than 20 scholars from around the world.
To expand the research capacity of NU-Q, #IAS_NUQ has partnered with the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS) to establish a Critical Security Studies Hub in Qatar and was recently awarded a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York to build the field of Arab Information and Media Studies (AIMS) over the next two years.
