Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies
Each year, Northwestern Buffett brings a leading international scholar to Northwestern for an academic quarter. The Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies teaches up to two courses in a Northwestern University department related to their area(s) of expertise, gives a public lecture and contributes to relationship development between Northwestern Buffett and their home institution.
Questions about the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professorship should be directed to Harrington Weihl, Northwestern Buffett's Director for Research.
Past Roberta Buffett Visiting Professors of International Studies
Tymofii Brik
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Department of Sociology
Visited Spring Quarter 2023
Tymofii Brik served as the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Department of Sociology during the Spring 2023 quarter. Brik is rector at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in Ukraine. His research interests focus on religious markets, long-term social mobility and social network analysis. Since 2021, Brik has served as the national coordinator of the European Social Survey (ESS) in Ukraine, an international comparative study conducted in the majority of European countries since 2002. Brik also serves as the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the CEDOS think tank, as a member of the advisory board of the Texty.org “Rating Sellers” project and as a member of the advisory board of Gradus Research. Brik is also one of the co-founders of the public restaurant Urban Space 500 in Kyiv.
More
Rana Kazkaz
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Program of Middle Eastern and North African Studies
Visited Fall Quarter 2021Rana Kazkaz, an award-winning filmmaker, is an assistant professor of communication in residence at Northwestern Qatar where she teaches narrative filmmaking. Kazkaz’s films have been recognized at the world’s leading film festivals including Cannes, Sundance and Toronto. With a focus on Syrian stories, her producing, screenwriting and directing portfolio includes Mare Nostrum (2016) which has been selected in over 100 international film festivals and won more than 40 awards; Searching for the Translator, a documentary (2016); Deaf Day (2011) and Kemo Sabe (2007). Her first feature film The Translator (2020) won several grants and development awards including the Arte Award at L’Atelier de la Cinefondation at the Cannes Film Festival (2017), the CNC Award at Meetings on the Bridge at the Istanbul Film Festival (2017) and a Tribeca Alumni Grant (2018). The Translator has been selected in numerous international festivals and was distributed internationally in 2021. Her current film projects include Honest Politics and The Foolishness of God: My Forgiveness Journey with Desmond Tutu. She is a member of the Académie des César.
More
Anthony Fung
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies
Visited Winter Quarter 2020
Dr. Anthony Fung served as the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Culture during the Winter 2020 quarter. Anthony Fung is Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is also Director of the Global Studies Program and Co-Director of Hong Kong Institute of Asia Pacific Studies. His research interests focus on popular culture, cultural/ creative industries and policy, and youth and cultural studies. He is editor-in-chief of Global Media and China, and associate editor of International Journal of Cultural Studies. His recent books include Youth Cultures in China (2016 under Polity Press), Global Game Industries and Cultural Policy (2016 under Palgrave Macmillan), and Culture as Logistics (forthcoming under SAGE).
More
Julio César Guanche Zaldívar
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Department of History
Visited Spring Quarter 2019 and Fall Quarter 2021Julio César Guanche Zaldívar, a renowned legal and political historian of modern Cuba, served as the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Department of History during the Spring 2019 and Fall 2021 quarters. Guanche came to the department with experience teaching in Havana, Spain and Ecuador and on the heels of a visiting position at Harvard. His work focuses on republicanism, populism, and constitutional law. For his project underway during his visiting professorship, he studied the ideas, conflicts, actors and repertoires of control and contestation that revolve around the pillars of a democratic understanding of republicanism.
Papa Amadou Awa Ndiaye
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Visited Spring Quarter 2018Ndiaye Papa Amadou is a Professor of Ophthalmology in the Faculty of Medicine, Pharmacy and Odontology at University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, Senegal. He also works to fight blindness in his role with the Abass Ndao Hospital, for which he was recently honored by the Fondation Théa, an initiative of Laboratoires Théa to promote or assist humanitarian or general interest initiatives to aid the fight against blindness in France and abroad.
Philippa Skotnes
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Program of African Studies
Visited Spring Quarter 2017Philippa (Pippa) Skotnes is an artist, curator, scholar and director of the Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is engaged with several digitizing and research projects and has jointly curated a photographic archive and the University of Cape Town’s Katrine Harries Print Cabinet. Her major interests include book arts, curatorship and archive, particularly the Bleek and Lloyd collection and its extended archive. Pippa’s major projects have included various publications around the Bleek and Lloyd archive. Her work Rock art made in translation (2010, to accompany an exhibition at the Iziko SAM) and Landscape to literature (2011), a catalogue to the exhibition of the same name at the Michaelis Galleries marked the centenary conference of the publication of Bleek and Lloyd’s Specimens of Bushman folklore. Her recent co-authored publications are Curature: In and Out of the Archive with Carolyn Hamilton and The Courage of ||kabbo with Janette Deacon. She is currently working on a book about a nineteenth century murder in the northern Cape as well as a project about the nature of composition.
Timothy Stanton
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Department of Political Science
Visited Spring Quarter 2016Timothy Stanton is a Professor in the Department of Politics at University of York, United Kingdom. Timothy Stanton's research and teaching interests are in political theory and the history of political thought. In particular, he is interested in the historical formation of modern ideas of political value and political action and the wider understandings of politics to which they contribute. His work focuses on major seventeenth century thinkers, especially John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and their reception and significance to the present day. He is also interested in the relationship between politics and religion, political theology and the development of ideas of popular sovereignty. He has held research fellowships at Yale University, the University of Cambridge and the Lichtenberg Kolleg at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. He is a Life Member of Wolfson College, Cambridge. His research has been funded by, among others, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Balzan Foundation.
Alessandro Ferrari
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Department of Economics
Visited Spring Quarter 2015Alessandro Ferrari is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Zurich. His research interests are macroeconomics, international trade and industrial organization . He has published on international risk sharing in the economic and monetary union of the European Union and subsidy competition in the US. His ongoing projects focus on trade policy with irreversible investment and production networks, invoicing currency and shock transmission.
Sumit Kumar Ganguly
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Department of Political Science
Visited Spring Quarter 2014Sumit Kumar Ganguly is a specialist on the international and comparative politics of contemporary South Asia. Currently, he is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has previously taught at James Madison College of Michigan State University, Hunter College of the City University of New York and the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent books are Deadly Impasse: India and Pakistan at the Dawn of a New Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Ascending India and Its State Capacity (Yale University Press, 2017) co-authored with William R. Thompson.
Jean-Marc Coicaud
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Department of Political Science
Visited Spring Quarter 2013Jean-Marc Coicaud is Distinguished Professor of Law and Global Affairs at Rutgers University and Distinguished Chair Professor at Fudan University’s Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences in Shanghai, China. He is an elected member of the the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea). From 1992 to 1996, he was a member of former United Nations Secretary-General, Dr. Boutros-Ghali’s speech-writing team and later served as a Senior Academic Officer and Research Director with the United Nations University. His research areas are political legitimacy, global justice and international law. He has published 16 books and more than 100 papers. His books Legitimacy and Politics: A Contribution to the Study of Political Right and Political Responsibility and Towards the International Rule of Law have been translated into other languages and enjoy wide academic attention and influence.
Scott Reese
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Department of History
Visited Spring Quarter 2012Scott Reese is a historian of Islam in Africa and the western Indian Ocean. Reese focuses specifically on comparative history aimed at breaking down many of the regional and geographic categories currently in use across the academy. His main research interests are comparative Sufism, modern Muslim discourses of reform, and the construction of world systems both in fact and imagination since 1500. He currently explores the role of Muslim religious discourse in mediating the social consequences of empire. Focusing on the British Settlement of Aden, located in present-day Yemen, this new project explores how Muslims from across Britain’s empire use the commonality of their faith to fashion a new community within the spaces created by imperial rule. Reese has published numerous scholarly articles as well as two book length collections. He is currently the Senior Editor of the journal Islamic Africa.
Bernhard Zangl
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Department of Political Science
Visited Fall Quarter 2011Bernhard Zangl is professor of global governance and public policy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. He graduated from the University of Tübingen in 1994 and received his PhD from the University of Bremen in 1998. Following this, he spent four years in Bremen as assistant professor and then two years as John F. Kennedy Fellow at Harvard University and as Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. In 2005 he returned to Bremen as associate professor of international relations. In 2009 he moved to Munich, where he now also serves as director of the Munich Center on Governance, Communication, Public Policy and Law. His research focuses on the transformations of modern governance arrangements and the resulting transformation of modern states and global order. Specializing on international institutions, he has done research on the legalization of international institutions. Among his more recent publications are: “Judicialization Matters! A Comparison of Dispute Settlement under GATT and the WTO” in International Studies Quarterly and “On the Transformation of Warfare – A Plausibility Probe of the New War Thesis” in the Journal of International Relations and Development (with Monika Heupel).
Richard S. Williamson
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Department of Political Science
Visited Fall Quarter 2009 and Winter Quarter 2010Richard S. Williamson was the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in fall 2009 and winter 2010. A partner in the international law firm of Winston & Strawn LLP, he has a wide range of government and academic experience. Ambassador Williamson recently completed an assignment as the President’s Special Envoy to Sudan. Earlier, he served in the Reagan White House as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy to the Chief of Staff and then on the White House senior staff as Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs. His many diplomatic posts have included serving as Ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna (including the International Atomic Energy Agency); Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs; a member of the President’s General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Ambassador Williamson has been an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware Law School and the Sharkey Visiting Scholar on United Nations Studies at the Whitehead School of International Relations, Seton Hall University. He is editor of three books and the author of over 180 articles and seven books, most recently American Primacy and Multilateral Cooperation. He received his AB from Princeton University and his JD from the University of Virginia School of Law where he served as Executive Editor of The Virginia Journal of International Law.
Keila Grinberg
Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Department of History
Visited Spring Quarter 2009Keila Grinberg is the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies and Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a specialist on slavery and race in the Atlantic World and has authored, co-authored, and edited several books and articles in Portuguese, English, Spanish, French and Russian, including A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship (UNC Press, 2019), a finalist of the 2020 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. She also co-directs the public digital history project "Present Pasts: Memories of Slavery in Brazil." Her most recent research project examines nineteenth-century cases of kidnapping and illegal enslavement on the southern Brazilian border. She is also interested in Jewish history, the teaching and writing of history and memory and public history of slavery.
