Thadeus Dowad is an assistant professor in the Art History Department at Northwestern. He specializes in the art and architectural history of the Ottoman Empire and Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, with an emphasis on the transregional impacts of capitalism, empire-building, slavery, and revolutionary politics on metropolitan and colonial artistic cultures. He is particularly interested in the history of French imperialism in Islamic West Asia and North Africa as the framework for an integrated history of art before World War I. Other areas of research and teaching include transcultural histories of portraiture; European and Ottoman Orientalisms; queerness in Islamic art; and the history of turquerie.
Jeff Eden (Ph.D., Harvard, 2016) is a historian of Russia and Central Asia. His books include God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War (Oxford, 2021), Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge, 2018), and Warrior Saints of the Silk Road (Brill, 2018). Before coming to Northwestern, he was Pandion haliaetus (Seahawk Honorary) Assistant Professor of History at St. Mary's College of Maryland, and before that he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities. He is currently working on two book projects, one about the Pugachev Rebellion in Russia (1773-1775) and the other about the Caucasus during the Second World War. At Northwestern, he teaches classes on Russian, Central Asian, and global history.Bihter Esener
College Fellow of Medieval Mediterranean and Islamic Art in the Department of Art History
besener@northwestern.edu
Bihter Esener (she/her/hers) is an art historian of the visual and material cultures of the medieval Islamic world, with a special interest in Armenian, Byzantine, and Persian-Islamic artistic exchange and cultural encounters in medieval Anatolia, the South Caucasus, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Her dissertation, which she is currently transforming into a book, contextualized bronze mirrors within the lives of the inhabitants of medieval Anatolia by considering their various functions in personal adornment and their use in devotional, divinatory, and talismanic practices during the Seljuk period, i.e., between the late eleventh and early fourteenth centuries.
Before joining Northwestern, Prof. Esener was a lecturer in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Moreover, she is one of the founding members of Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, for which she serves as Digital Technologies Manager, as well as an assistant editor at the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA).
Prof. Esener’s faculty spotlight can be read here.
· Academic page
· Art History faculty page
Seda Öğrenci
Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science, Keyman MTS Faculty Board
seda@northwestern.edu
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Wendy Pearlman is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she specializes in Middle East politics. She is the author of four books, We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017), Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2011) Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (Nation Books, 2003), and Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States that Host Nonstate Actors (co-authored with Boaz Atzili, Columbia University Press,), as well as dozens of articles, essays, or book chapters. Wendy earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an MA from Georgetown University, and a BA from Brown University. She has conducted research in Spain, Germany, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Israel, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Özge Samanci, media artist and graphic novelist, is an associate professor in Northwestern University’s School of Communication. Her interactive installations have been exhibited internationally, including Siggraph Art Gallery, FILE festival, Currents New Media, Piksel Festival for Electronic Arts, The Tech Museum of Innovation, WRO Media Art Biennial, Athens International Festival of Digital Arts and New Media, ISEA among others. Her autobiographical graphic novel Dare to Disappoint (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015) received international press attention and has been translated into five languages.
Shayna Silverstein is an assistant professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Her research examines the politics and aesthetics of sound and movement in the contemporary Middle East, with a focus on Syria. Her recent publications include essays in Music & Politics, Remapping Sound Studies (Duke Press), Punk Ethnography (Wesleyan Press), Islam and Popular Culture (University of Texas Press), and an audiography in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image.
Lauren Stokes (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2016) is a historian of modern Germany, with a particular focus on migration and race in German history. She is currently at work on a book manuscript about “family reunification” for foreign workers in West Germany, one that explores the ways that regulation of the intimate sphere was linked to broader processes of labor migration, national identity formation, and European integration. She currently conducts research in German, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish.
Oya Topçuoğlu is Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Middle East and North African Languages Program at Northwestern University. She holds a Ph.D. in the Art and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, and a BA in Ottoman History from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Dr. Topçuoğlu teaches on a range of subjects, including modern Turkish language and culture, and the history and archaeology of the Middle East. Dr. Topçuoğlu is an archaeologist by training, who specializes in the art, archaeology, and history of ancient Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Her research addresses issues of social identity and cultural exchange, and the effects of political change and ideology on the material record of the ancient Middle East.
Emrah Yıldız (he/him/o) is a socio-cultural anthropologist of cross-border mobility and region formation, whose research spans political economy, religious studies, and social geography. More specifically he researches and teaches about ritual, saints and mobility in Islam; sanctions, contraband commerce and national currencies in political economy as well as asylum, borders and their territorial states across Southwest Asia.
