Announcing the 2024–25 Cohort of Buffett Faculty Fellows
The Northwestern Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs is pleased to announce our cohort of non-residential faculty fellowships for the 2024–25 academic year. These fellowships support Northwestern faculty who are conducting research outside of the contiguous United States.
Iza Ding’s (Political Science) book project Green Waves documents global histories of modern environmentalism, zeroing in on cases across the United States, Europe and Asia. Ding demonstrates the malleability of environmentalism as a political idea from its conservative-romanticist origins, through a liberal movement galvanized by labor activists and anti-war protestors, up to the present, when conservatives are gradually discovering the political limits of climate-change skepticism and denial.
Katherine E. Hoffman’s (Anthropology and MENA Studies) project Adjudicating Family: Islam, Adoption, and Human Rights at Home and in Court examines the lived experiences and legal culture around Islamic guardianship (kafala) and the adoption of North African children in transnational perspective.
As the inaugural Buffett/Kaplan Global Humanities Fellow, Heather Jaber (Communication and Liberal Arts, Northwestern Qatar) will work on her book project Feeling Like the Global South, which offers bahdala—the Arabic word for a humbling ridicule—as an emotions framework for the underlying economy of the Internet and the way it structures global belonging.
Daniel Majchrowicz’s (Asian Languages and Cultures) Hindi: A Global History is a historical and ethnographic study of Hindi’s global rise and stubborn persistence that asks what it might mean to become a citizen of the world through a subaltern language of the global South.
Zekeria Ahmed Salem (Political Science), in a project tentatively titled Islamic Knowledge Unbound: Mauritania and the Making of Global Islamic Authority (19th–21st century), investigates how The Islamic Republic of Mauritania, a little-known corner of the Western Sahara, earned an outsized influence in global arenas of Sunni Islamic knowledge and religious authority.
Özge Samancı (Radio/Television/Film) will work on her graphic novel Not Here But Everywhere, which explores the core questions of international migration studies through an engaging, accessible story of transformational change, cultural difference, and escape from trauma, featuring two main characters from Turkey and the United States.
Elizabeth Son (Theatre), in Holding Histories: Korean Diasporic Women’s Art and Activism, explores how contemporary Korean diasporic women harness the power of embodied culture to grapple with histories of social and political violence. Her project showcases the richness of Korean diasporic women’s aesthetic innovations and activist collaborations in addressing issues around peace and security, racial and gender-based justice, and environmentalism and sustainability.
Christopher Udry (Economics), in Economic Organization of Households and Communities in West Africa, will focus on changes in institutions, with particular attention to seasonality, risk and economic, social and environmental heterogeneity.
In the academic year following their fellowships, these faculty will give public talks at the Buffett Institute to share their new work.