Mkhaimar Abusada

Visiting Lecturer, Political Science and the Middle East and North African Studies Program

Contact: m.abusada@northwestern.edu

Mkhaimar Abusada is a visiting lecturer in residence from October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2025. An Associate Professor of Political Science at Al-Azhar University-Gaza and the former chair of the university's political science department, Mkhaimar’s primary research topics include Palestinian politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He received his PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Roberson Alphonse

Visiting Lecturer, Medill School of Journalism and Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

Contact: roberson.alphonse@northwestern.edu

Roberson Alphonse is a visiting lecturer at the Medill School of Journalism in residence from January 2025 to December 31, 2025. Roberson is a Haitian media professional and serves as the head of national news at Le Nouvelliste, the newsroom director at Magik 9 and the producer of the Dèyè Kay program. He reports on sensitive subjects and challenges facing the country, including corruption, human rights, and socio-political crises in Haiti. In addition to his investigative journalism, Roberson works to train the next generation of journalists in Haiti and is working on his first book, an anthology retracing his 20 years of journalism.

Haula Noor

Buffett-EDGS Visiting Scholar

Haula Noor is in residence from January 19 through February 28, 2026 and is hosted by Brannon Ingram, Associate Professor of Religious Studies. Noor is a lecturer and the Secretary of the Doctoral Program at the Faculty of Islamic Studies, Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia (UIII). She also serves as the Co-Director of the Center of Islam & Global Challenges at the Faculty of Islamic Studies, UIII. Apart from this position, she is the Program Director on Good Governance at KiPRAH Indonesia and is a researcher at the Pusat Pengkajian Islam dan Masyarakat, UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta. Previously, Noor was a research fellow at the ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore. She earned her PhD in International, Political, and Strategic Studies from the Australian National University (ANU), focusing on the role of family dynamics in jihadist radicalization. Her expertise encompasses gender and terrorism, family psychology, Islamic studies, and the intersection of Islam, security, and democratic governance. Noor has published extensively on issues of radicalization, religious authority, and women's roles in terrorism. During her appointment, Haula will work on shifting her PhD dissertation on "The Family Context and Its Role in Making Jihadists in Indonesian" into a publishable monograph.

Bronwyn Rae

Visiting Scholar

Contact: brr666@sbcglobal.net

Dr. Bronwyn Rae is in residence through July 15, 2027 and is hosted by Deborah Cohen, Director of the Roberta Buffett Institute. Dr. Rae received her medical degree from Sydney University and her MPH from Northwestern University, where she specialized in pediatric anesthesiology. She has a long-standing interest in anesthesia in under-resourced environments and has worked in the Solomon Islands, Pakistan, and Inner Mongolia with local anesthesia providers. Since 2013, she has worked closely with anesthesia faculty in Tanzania to improve anesthesia training there. She was honored for this work with an award for services to pediatric anesthesia at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society of Anesthesiologists  in Tanzania.  

Inaya Rakhmani

Buffett-EDGS Visiting Scholar

Inaya Rakhmani is a visiting scholar in residence from January 5–19, 2026 and is hosted by Laura Hein, Director of the Arryman Scholars Program within the Roberta Buffett Institute’s Equality Development & Globalization Studies Program (EDGS) Program and Harold H. & Virginia Anderson Professor of History at the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. Her visit is supported by a Buffett Global Collaboration Grant.

Rakhmani is the Director of Academics of the Asia Research Centre at the University of Indonesia (ARC-UI). She uses cultural political economy to study media and communications as well as knowledge and information to explain broader capitalist changes. She is deeply concerned with social sciences, social inequalities, and democratic developments. She researches the role of social and mass media in hindering democratic developments in Indonesia, with comparisons to India, Egypt, and Turkey from 2015 to the present day. She is also concerned with how social sciences and humanities are at times disconnected from the needs of the people, both in long-term analysis and short-term responsiveness. Since 2014, she has been mapping the structural barriers of social scientists to carry out critical research in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. She has also been actively engaging with local, national, and global policy makers to make the issue better known. She is the author of Mainstreaming Islam in Indonesia: Television, Identity and the Middle Class, published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2016. She is currently finalizing a study on social sciences and policy responses in Southeast Asia (eleven countries) in partnership with the Global Development Network and the International Development Research Centre. She is also an honorary member of the Indonesian Young Academy of Sciences.

Salvatore Simarmata

Buffett-EDGS Visiting Scholar

Salvatore Simarmata is a visiting scholar in residence from April 1-30, 2026 and is hosted by Erik Nisbet, Owen L. Coon Endowed Professor in Policy Analysis & Communication. Simarmata is a Senior Lecturer in Communication at Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia and Director of the Atma Jaya Institute of Public Policy, a research institute dedicated to advancing evidence-based policymaking for a sustainable future. His research focuses on political communication, particularly how digital platforms, automation, and the hybrid media system reshape strategies of attack politics, drive the circulation of disinformation, and influence democratic competition. In addition, his work examines how political actors and institutions as well as the media shape policymaking processes and narratives, and the decline of the deliberative public sphere in Indonesia.

Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih

Buffett-EDGS Visiting Scholar

Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih is a visiting scholar in residence from January 5–19, 2026 and is hosted by Laura Hein, Director of the Arryman Scholars Program within the Roberta Buffett Institute’s Equality Development & Globalization Studies Program (EDGS) Program and Harold H. & Virginia Anderson Professor of History at the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. Her visit is supported by a Buffett Global Collaboration Grant.

Widya Permata Yasih is the Deputy Director of Academics of the Asia Research Centre at the University of Indonesia (ARC-UI). She earned her PhD from the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute. Her doctoral research investigates the expansion of precarious work arrangements tied to the gig economy and its effects on workers’ subjective experience, identity formation, and organizing propensity in Indonesia. She is also a faculty member at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Indonesia. She has published in outlets like the Jakarta Post, the Conversation, Indonesia at Melbourne, and others. One of her articles, “Jakarta’s Precarious Workers: Are They a New Dangerous Class?”, was published by the Journal of Contemporary Asia in 2017.

Önder Eren Akgül

Postdoctoral Fellow

Contact: onder.akgul@northwestern.edu

Önder Eren Akgül is the 2024–2026 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. Akgül is a historian of capitalism, political economy and the environment in the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern Mediterranean. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, A Global Hinterland: Crisis and the Order of Accumulation in Late Ottoman Greater Izmir, an intertwined history of global capitalism, Ottoman political economy, and local labor and ecology. Akgül is concurrently developing two new research projects—the first exploring the history of extractivism in the Ottoman mountains and the second focusing on the global history of the left in Turkey during the long 1960s. Akgül is a regular producer for the Ottoman History Podcast. Before coming to Northwestern, Akgül taught classes on the history of Modern Turkey and global capitalism at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, and International Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.