Visiting Scholars
Northwestern Buffett’s Visiting Scholars are academics from around the world who collaborate with the Northwestern Buffett and University communities.
Learn about past Buffett Visiting Scholars.
Northwestern Buffett Visiting Scholars
Julien Barrier holds a PhD from Sciences Po in Paris, France and is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. His research addresses how economic forces shape the production of knowledge and contribute to institutional change by looking at the transformation of higher education over the last 50 years. With a background in organizational sociology, he has also researched social movements, science and innovation policies as well as managerial reforms in public administration.
During his stay at Northwestern University, Barrier is working 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 intends to explore emerging global trends and curriculum change in higher education.
Ghazi Hashimi is an Associate Professor of Law at Kabul University in Afghanistan. Since 2008, he has taught criminalistics, general criminal law, international criminal law, trial advocacy in criminal cases and criminal procedure. He has also collaborated on several projects with the National Center for Policy Research since 2006. He believes that legal education is an effective tool for fostering development and strengthening rule of law in Afghanistan.
Hashimi went on to complete his Master’s in Law (LLM) at the University of Washington School of Law in 2013. He has translated the Max Planck Manual on Fair Trial Standards from Dari into Pashto and has translated General Criminal Law by Dr. Hafizullah Danish from Pashto into Dari. His article “Helping Afghanistan’s Informal Dispute Resolution Systems Follow Afghan Law in Criminal Matters: What Afghanistan Can Learn from Native American Peacemaking Program” was published in the Michigan State International Law Review, and his article “Defending the Principle of Legality in Afghanistan: Toward a Unified Interpretation of Article 130 to the Afghan Constitution” was published in the Oregon Review of International Law. Hashimi has also published several other articles and textbooks in national languages.
Haman Mana, the publisher of Le Jour, one of Cameroon’s largest daily newspapers, was forced to flee his country following the paper’s investigation of corruption and influence peddling by a powerful media mogul. Mana fled Cameroon in early February and arrived at Northwestern, where he is serving as a Visiting Lecture and journalist in residence through the 2023–2024 academic year. Northwestern Buffett, in partnership with the Medill School of Jouranlism, the School of Communication, the Holthues Trust and an anonymous donor are funding Mana’s position for the year.
During his time at Northwestern, Mana intends to continue work on a book about Cameroon’s slide toward authoritarian rule while he also continues running Le Jour from Evanston. Additionally, Mana will share his journalism experience with students across Northwestern.
Prior to joining Northwestern, Hafizullah Seddiqi served as a lecturer and Associate Dean of Law and Political Science Faculty at Herat University in Herat, Afghanistan. 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.
Seddiqi worked for seven years as a defense attorney in addition to training students seeking to become defense attorneys. He graduated from Herat University in 2013 and earned his LLM from the University of Washington School of Law in 2019, after which he interned in the Law Library of Congress where he conducted research on legal issues in Afghanistan and published an academic article in Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, a double-blind, peer-reviewed journal published by Indiana University. Seddiqi was a member of Afghanistan Independent Bar Association as well as a member of the Business Incubator Committee at Herat University, which organizes workshops and advises merchants on commercial contracts in a close relation with Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce. Through this work, he negotiated with lords to extend the alternative disputes resolution in Afghanistan as well as trained lords and villagers in family and ownership dispute resolution.
Dima Younes holds a PhD in Sociology from Sciences Po in Paris, France and an MSc in Regional and Urban Planning from the London School of Economics in the UK. She is an Associate Professor of Organization Theory at EMLyon Business School in France. Her research investigates the transformations of capitalism, work and organizations with a particular attention given to power and resistance, gender and social movements. Empirically, she investigated innovation and industrial policies in France as well as their implications on corporations, small and medium-sized firms and public or private research centers. She also examined gender policies and their implications on household dynamics, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic in France.
To understand the possibilities to organize for a fairer and more sustainable world, Dima is currently working on two projects. The first one examines the day-to-day life of the Lebanese (previously) middle-class after the economic crisis of 2019. It examines how individuals deal with scarcity problems while contesting the existing political and economic regime. The second project attempts to compare the surprises and experiences of Lebanese post-2019 immigrants in different countries. It attempts to better understand the characteristics of different Western economies with regards to family/work relationships, gender and foreignness.
Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program
Find more information on Keyman Postdoctoral Fellows.Ekin Kurtiç (Ph.D., 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 is working 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. Infrastructural Landscapes shows that dam building is a central site of governing the environment not only through conquest but also through conservation and a process in which people navigate the life shaped by the intersection of dam-induced destruction and reconstruction. 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. Prior to coming to Northwestern, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University.
Kenan Behzat Sharpe is the 2023-2025 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. He completed his PhD in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2019. His dissertation focused comparatively on the poetry and popular music of 1960s social movements in Turkey and the United States. He is currently writing his first book manuscript: Rockers and Radicals in Anatolia: Turkish Psychedelic Rock and the World 1960s. The project discusses an experimental genre of popular music that combined melodies, instruments, and lyrics from the Turkish countryside with world trends of surf, psychedelic, and progressive rock. It treats Anadolu Rock as a window into the politically turbulent and culturally rich period of the long Turkish 1960s, analyzing music’s central role in Turkish opposition movements and the influence of rural and minority musical traditions on urban youth culture. Before coming to Northwestern, Sharpe conducted field research as a postdoctoral fellow with the American Research Institute in Turkey and also taught literature classes at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Besides the 1960s in Turkey, his published research focuses on Turkish and Greek literature, comparative social movements, theories of aesthetics and politics, non-western modernisms, and feminist film theory. While in Istanbul, he also worked as a journalist, publishing in outlets like the Washington Post and Al-Monitor and working as a columnist and show host for various independent Turkish media outlets.Bilge Yabanci is Marie Curie Global fellow (2022–2024) at Northwestern University and Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy). Her research interests are interdisciplinary and relate to political science, sociology, and communication studies. In her current project co-hosted by Northwestern and Ca' Foscari, she investigates how the immigrant and refugee rights movement (IRRM) in Turkey can tailor its public communication strategies to reframe migrants and refugees as 'deserving' and 'rights-bearing agents'. In the first stage, the project maps the capacities, networks, and communicative strategies of the emergent IRRM in the country. In the second stage, survey experiments aim to identify which language -or linguistic framing- can solicit broader support and replace the racialized and marginalizing views. Currently, Bilge is also working 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.
Equality Development And Globalization Studies (EDGS)
Find more information on EDGS Fellows and Scholars here.Dr. Luthfi Adam graduated from the Department of History at Northwestern in 2020. He was awarded "Distinction" upon defense of his dissertation, "Cultivating Power: Buitenzorg Botanic Garden and Empire-Building in the Netherlands East Indies, 1745–1917." He also won the 2020 Harold Perkin Prize for the Best Dissertation in the Department of History at Northwestern. As a 2013 Arryman Fellow, Luthfi pursued a comparative study of the rise of native journalism and nationalism movements in post colonial countries. He graduated with a BA in Journalism at Padjadjaran University in 2007 and continued on with a master’s degree in cultural and media studies at Gadjah Mada University where he graduated cum laude in 2011 and then became a lecturer in Padjadjaran University.Dr. Muhammad Fajar graduated from the Department of Political Science at Northwestern in 2020. He successfully defended his dissertation, "The Path to Preemption: The Politics of the Indonesian Student Movements during the Regime Transition, 1998–1999." As a 2013 Arryman Fellow, Muhammad researched democracy promotion policies in Indonesia supported by international agencies. He received his BA in sociology from University of Indonesia (UI). In 2011, he received the Netherlands Fellowship Program (NFP) scholarship for his master’s degree at the Institute of Social Studies, in the Hague, specializing in governance and democracy (G&D).
