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.
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.
Dr. Jessica Winegar is Professor of Anthropology and Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of numerous articles on visual culture and politics in the Middle East that have appeared in publications such as American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Review of Middle East Studies, Critical Interventions, Contemporary Practices, Middle East Report, Jadaliyya and ArteEast. Her book Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford, 2006), won the Albert Hourani award for best book in Middle East studies and the Arnold Rubin award for best book on African arts. She is also the co-author, with Lara Deeb, of Anthropology’s Politics: Discipline and Region through the Lens of the Middle East (Stanford, 2015). Dr. Winegar is the recipient of numerous grants for her research, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Fulbright.Emrah Yıldız is Crown Junior Chair in Middle East Studies and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. He is a historically attuned cultural anthropologist, studying routes of religious, commercial and political mobility between Iran, Turkey and Syria. His research lies at the intersection of historiography and ethnography of borders and their states; anthropology of pilgrimage and visitation in Islam as well as the study of currencies and contraband commerce in political economy. The Wenner-Gren Foundation, Die Zeit Stiftung Bucerius Fellowship in Migration Studies, Cora Du Bois Charitable Trust, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Studies have supported his research and writing. A founding and former co-editor of Jadaliyya’s Turkey Page, Yıldız co-edited (with Anthony Alessandrini and Nazan Üstündag) the collection “Resistance Everywhere:” The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey (2014).
