Nicole Huang

Visiting Scholar

Nicole Huang is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Professor Huang received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of California-Los Angeles and taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for seventeen years before joining HKU. She was hosted by Paola Zamperini, Associate Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Nicole was in residence from November 17 to November 24, 2024.

Sirojuddin Arif

Visiting Scholar

Sirojuddin Arif has vast experience in conducting fieldwork on social policy and poverty reduction in Indonesia. Sirojuddin’s research interests focused on the political economy of development, social policy, poverty reduction, and religion and politics. He was hosted by  Jeffrey Winters, Director of the Buffett Institute’s Equality Development & Globalization Studies program and Professor of Political Science at the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. Sirojuddin was in residence from August 9 to September 27, 2024.

Dima Younes

Visiting Scholar

Dima Younes is an Associate Professor of Organization Theory at Emlyon Business School in France. Her research investigates the transformations of capitalism, work and organizations with particular attention to power and resistance, gender and social movements. She was hosted by Kellogg School of Management Professor Brayden King, who co-leads the Buffett Institute's AI and Social Movements Global Working Group. Dima was in residence at Northwestern through July 2024.

Hafizullah Seddiqi

Visiting Scholar

Hafizullah Seddiqi joined us from Herat University in Herat, Afghanistan, where he served as a lecturer and Associate Dean of Law and Political Science Faculty. He also served at the Head of Quality Assurance Committee, observing all faculty subcommittees and reporting back to the Dean. He has taught Islamic Law, Family Law, Contracts Law, International Trade Law, Labor Law and Intellectual Property Law.  He supported research efforts at Northwestern Buffett and Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law through July 2024.

Ghazi Hashimi

Visiting Scholar

Ghazi Hashimi joined us from Kabul University in Afghanistan, where he served as an Associate Professor of Law teaching criminalistics, general criminal law, international criminal law, trial advocacy in criminal cases and criminal procedure. Hashimi has collaborated on several projects with the National Center for Policy Research since 2006. He supported research efforts at Northwestern Buffett and Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law through July 2024. 

Julien Barrier

Visiting Scholar

Julien Barrier is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France. His research addresses how economic forces shape the production of knowledge and contribute to institutional change. Julien was hosted by Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Professor of Sociology Wendy Espeland and was at Northwestern for the 2023–24 academic year. During his stay, he worked on a book manuscript addressing how the development of university-industry relations redefined the organization, values and orientation of academic research in France. He also explored emerging global trends and curriculum change in higher education.

A/nil

Visiting Scholar

A/nil, a.k.a. Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan, is a poet and Associate Professor of English at Government Arts and Science College in Pathiripala, India. He is the author of The Absent Color: Poems published by Navayana Publishing. He was hosted by Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Professor of South Asian and Comparative Literature Laura Brueck, who co-leads the Buffett Institute's Race, Caste and Colorism Global Working Group. A/nil joined us from May 4–18, 2024.

S. Anand

Visiting Scholar

S. Anand is an Indian author, publisher and journalist. He co-founded Navayana Publishing, an independent anti-caste publishing house based in Delhi, India. He was hosted by Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Professor of South Asian and Comparative Literature Laura Brueck, who co-leads the Buffett Institute's Race, Caste and Colorism Global Working Group. The group is working with Navayana Publishing to curate, edit and publish a book series on race, caste and colorism. S. Anand joined us from May 4–18, 2024.

Carlos A. Manrique

Visiting Scholar

Carlos A. Manrique is Associate Professor at the Philosophy Department of Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). He received his MA in Religious Studies (2004) and PhD in Philosophy of Religions (2009) from the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. At the intersections of philosophy, political theory and political theology, his research explores the creative work deployed in social movements and community-based organizing, and how it mobilizes alternative understandings of peacebuilding and democracy beyond the restrictive and levelling frame of consensual liberal democracy. From this angle, he studies the forceful role of popular forms of religion and spirituality in the struggles for social, racial and environmental justice of under-privileged communities in Colombia and Latin America.

He was hosted by Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, with whom he collaborated on a book co-authored by scholars from North and South America working on religion and politics in different contexts. In the book, they reflect on how specific sites of social protest, and distinct spaces and experiences of the political, might solicit a renewed understanding of the religious, the democratic and their multiple entanglements. He joined us from April 8–May 8, 2024.

Ipek Ipekcioglu

Keyman Visiting Scholar & Artist in Residence

Ipek Ipekçioglu ("DJ Ipek") joined us from Istanbul, Turkey from January 3–March 15, 2024. Hosted by the Buffett Institute's Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Ipek gave two guest lectures in Anthropology and German Studies, performed a live-set concert and facilitated two workshops on music production and political dissent in Turkey with the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program.

Bilge Yabanci

Marie Curie Global Fellow

Bilge Yabanci was a Marie Curie Global Fellow (2022–2024) at Northwestern University and Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy). Herinterdisciplinary research interests relate to political science, sociology and communication studies. Her project co-hosted by Northwestern and Ca' Foscari investigated how the immigrant and refugee rights movement (IRRM) in Turkey can better reframe migrants and refugees as 'deserving' and 'rights-bearing agents.' She also worked towards finalizing her book manuscript titled Civil Society and Autocratization: Repression, Cooptation and Contestation in Turkey. Before joining Northwestern, she was the recipient of Open Society Fellowship (Human Rights Cohort) and Swedish Institute postdoctoral fellowship. In her previous projects, she researched the transformation of social movements and civil society under the pressure of democratic backsliding. Carrying out on extensive fieldwork on women, youth and diaspora organizations, she investigated both cooptation and resistance dynamics within civil society.

Sarit Kraus

Visiting Scholar

Sarit Kraus (PhD, Computer Science, Hebrew University, 1989) is a Professor of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University. Her research is focused on intelligent agents and multi-agent systems integrating machine-learning techniques with optimization and game theory methods. In particular, she studies the development of intelligent agents that can interact proficiently with people and with robots. She has also contributed to the research on machine learning, agent optimization, autonomous vehicles, homeland security, adversarial patrolling, social networks and nonmonotonic reasoning.

For her work, she received many prestigious awards. She was awarded the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, the IJCAI Research Excellent Award, the ACM SIGART Agents Research Award, the ACM Athena Lecturer and the EMET prize, and she was twice the winner of the IFAAMAS influential paper award. She is an ACM, AAAI and EurAI fellow and a recipient of the advanced ERC grant. She also received a special commendation from the city of Los Angeles, together with Professor Tambe, Professor Ordonez and their USC students, for the creation of the ARMOR security scheduling system. She has published over 400 papers in leading journals and major conferences, co-authored five books and was IJCAI 2019 program chair.  She is an elected member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Fahri Öz

Keyman Scholar and Artist in Residence

Fahri Öz is an ex-academic, translator and poet. After signing the Academic for Peace declaration in 2016, he was dismissed in 2017 from his position at Ankara University, where he taught British and American poetry, poetic genres, literary history and translation. He translated into Turkish works by Christina Rossetti, Jack London, Saki, William Burroughs and Bob Dylan. He co-authored and co-edited a collection of very short fiction in Turkish called Hayat Kısa Proust Uzun. Currently he has been working on the translation of complete poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. He has a book of poems (Meşrutiyet Çok Bulutlu On Beş Santigrat Yağmur Olasılığı Sıfır) that came out in 2019. He was a visiting scholar and a resident of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Ekin Kurtiç

Keyman Postdoctoral Fellow

Ekin Kurtiç (PhD, Harvard University, 2019) is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research is at the intersection of environmental humanities, social studies of infrastructure and technopolitics and political ecology. She is the 2022–2024 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. While at Northwestern, Kurtiç worked on her first book manuscript, Infrastructural Landscapes: Building Dams, Restoring Ecologies in Turkey, which critically examines state-led projects of restoring and salvaging nature in the process of large dam building. She is also developing a new book on the techno-ecopolitics of reframing soil as a "carbon sink" against the backdrop of the climate crisis and its implications for human and non-human lives in agricultural and pastoral landscapes of Turkey.

Anoush Tamar Suni

Keyman Postdoctoral Fellow

Anoush Tamar Suni earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. For her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Palimpsests of Violence: Ruination and the Politics of Memory in Anatolia,” she spent over two years (2015-2017) in the region of Van, in southeastern Turkey, conducting ethnographic research. She is currently working on her book project, which investigates questions of memory and the material legacies of state violence in the region of Van with a focus on the historic Armenian and contemporary Kurdish communities. Prior to coming to Northwestern, she was a Manoogian Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Armenian Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include state and intercommunal violence, memory, materiality and landscape, cultural heritage, space and place, and political and historical anthropology in Turkey, Armenia, Kurdistan, and the broader Middle East.

 

Visiting Scholar

Woong-ghee Cha, a career diplomat, was a visiting scholar at the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs after serving as Deputy Consul General of the Korean Consulate in Chicago from July 2019 to February 2022. Prior to assuming the position at the Consulate, he was Director for ASEAN Cooperation and Overseas Korean Nationals Protection at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea. After joining the Ministry in August 2000, he served at multiple embassy postings in Tokyo, Japan (twice); Jakarta, Indonesia and Montevideo, Uruguay. During more than two decades of foreign service, he worked on many issues involving Korea-Japan/US relations, peace and security in the Korean Peninsula and ASEAN affairs among other things.  

Mr. Cha graduated from Seoul National University with a BA in international relations in Seoul, Republic of Korea and Keio University in Tokyo, Japan with an MA in political science. He also studied at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. 

More

• Local Diplomacy and Global Challenges with Beatriz Vivas and Woong-ghee Cha

 

Shu-chin Grace Kuo is a Professor of Law in the Department of Law at the National Cheng-Kung University in Taiwan, Republic of China. Her research interests lie in the field of legal knowledge of civil dispute resolution, including family law, civil procedure law and alternative dispute resolution. In recent years, Professor Kuo has focused on the methods and theories of anthropology of law and ethnography of law. Her research includes mandatory mediation, specifically how the state assists or interferes with private parties in reconstructing the order of their personal lives through formal and informal negotiation under judicial supervision. Professor Kuo is the author of two books: Legal Anthropology, Legal Knowledge and Legal Techniques (Fa Lu Ren Rei Xue, Fa Lu Zh Sh, U Fa Lu Chi Shu) and Family and Family Law Reconstruction (Xen Dai Chia Tin Shen Huo De Zhung Zheng U Zai S). 

Professor Kuo holds an SJD and an LLM from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and received her primary legal education in Taiwan, where she earned her LLB from National Taiwan University and passed the bar examination. Following the completion of her doctoral dissertation at Northwestern University, she was a visiting scholar of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture at Cornell Law School.

 

Najia Mahmodi

Visiting Scholar