NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• People

Alison Choi (she/her) is a third-year PhD student in the History department at Northwestern. Her research explores Korean diasporic history and the proliferation of joy in Korean American cultural production. Her historical practice is interdisciplinary, and she studies across and within Asian American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies to understand power systems and marginalized experiences in history. Alison earned her B.A. in History at Pomona College in 2019. She is also a member of GYOPO, a collective of diasporic Korean cultural producers and arts professionals generating and sharing progressive, critical, intersectional and intergenerational discourses, community alliances, and free educational programs in Los Angeles and beyond.

Ambassador Ian Kelly joins the International Studies Program for a three-year term, from 2021-2024. He previously served a three-year term with the Program from 2018-2021. Amb. Ian Kelly is Ambassador (ret.) in Residence at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He is a retired senior foreign service officer who last served as the United States Ambassador to Georgia, from 2015 to 2018. He previously served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) from 2010 to 2013. Prior to his ambassadorships, Kelly held a variety of high-level roles at the U.S. State Department, including serving as the Department spokesman under Secretary Hillary Clinton and as Director of the Office of Russian Affairs. Before joining the State Department, he earned a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Columbia University.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Faculty Advisory Board
• People

Amy Stanley (Ph.D., Harvard, 2007) is a historian of early modern and modern Japan with special interests in women's/gender history and global history. Her first book, Selling Women: Prostitution, Households, and the Market in Early Modern Japan (UC Press, 2012), explored how an expanding market for sex transformed the Japanese economy and changed women's lives in the years between 1600 and 1868. She has also written about adultery in the Edo period, education for geisha in the first years of the Meiji era, and the figure of the migrant maidservant in global history. Her most recent projec t is a history of Edo in the early nineteenth century, told through the life story of a runaway divorcee who married a masterless samurai and entered the service of a famous city magistrate. The book Stranger in the Shogun's Cit y was publsihed in 2020 and has been shortlisted for the Baillie-Gifford prize, the UK's most prestigious prize for non-fiction.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Student Advisory Board

Job Titles:

• Associate Director, WCCIAS

Bianca has been at the University since 2006 working with various area studies programs including Asian Studies, International Studies, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and Middle East & North African Studies. She received her M.A. in Social Sciences with a concentration in Anthropology, from the University of Chicago. As Associate Director she oversees the administration of the center's programs and works with the faculty Directors to advise students, manage curricular development, and provide program management. Prior to joining Northwestern she worked for the Environmental and Conservation Program at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago where she worked closely with a local NGO in Peru, CIMA-Cordillera Azul to protect cultural diversity and land security, and to integrate improved quality of life into the management of Cordillera Azul National Park. While at the Museum, she also worked with the interactive program expeditions@fieldmuseum™, which followed Field Museum scientists as they conduct groundbreaking scientific research around the world and communicate it to a wider audience through dispatches, interactives and photos. Contact Bianca for general IS advising, petitions to graduate, study abroad consultation, course planning, the Honors program, undergraduate prizes, Global Café, graduate mentors and instructors, and alumni connections.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Faculty Advisory Board
• People

Chris Abani teaches Creative Writing (Fiction and Poetry) and Literature. He is a novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright. His fields of interest include African Poetics, World Literature, 20th Century British and American Literature, African Presences in Medieval and Renaissance Cultural Spaces, The Architecture of Cities and their Potential Symbiotic Relationship with their Populations, West African Music, Postcolonial and Transnational Theory, Robotics and Consciousness, Yoruba and Igbo Philosophy and Religion. His prose includes The Secret History of Las Vegas (Penguin 2014), Song For Night (Akashic, 2007), The Virgin of Flames; (Penguin, 2007), Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006), GraceLand (FSG, 2004), and Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985). His poetry collections are Sanctificum (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), There Are No Names for Red (Red Hen Press, 2010), Feed Me The Sun - Collected Long Poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne's Lot (Red Hen, 2003) and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001). He has also written numerous essays, articles, book reviews and critical papers on art, poetry, cities and literature for local and international journals, magazines and newspapers. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Romanian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bosnian and Serbian. He holds a B.A. in English from Imo State University, Nigeria, an M.A. in Gender and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London, an M.A. in English and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He is the recipient of an Edgar Prize from the Mystery Writers of America, PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize and a Guggenheim Award. Chris Abani has taught in numerous countries around the world including countries in sub Saharan Africa (Gambia, Nigeria and South Africa), the Middle East (Qatar), Central Asia (Thailand) and Europe (UK). He is always at work on multiple projects.

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• People

Christopher Montague is a PhD student in Northwestern's Department of African American Studies. He broadly researches Black political thought and anticolonial movements in the twentieth century Anglophone world. His dissertation specifically analyzes this through the labor movement in Kingston, Jamaica and the women's movement in Southwest Nigeria. Chris grew up in Oxfordshire in the United Kingdom. In his spare time he likes to watch football (soccer), discuss politics, and listen to music.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Faculty Advisory Board
• Assistant Professor of History
• People

Daniel Immerwahr is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University. He is a historian, specializing in U.S. foreign relations and global history. His first book, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development, was published in 2015. He is currently working on a study of the United States' empire. For more information, including syllabi and his teaching schedule, see his website.

Job Titles:

• Instructor
• People

Felipe Gutierrez is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He specializes in nineteenth and early twentieth century Latin American and Iberian cultures, with a particular focus on issues of material and visual culture, museum and heritage studies. His research focuses on the repatriation of cultural heritage between Colombia and Spain, particularly in relation to golden items and treasures. He also studies the relationships between tangible cultural heritage, literature, and visual arts of these two countries from a transatlantic perspective. During 2022-2023, he worked as an interdisciplinary graduate fellow at The Block Museum.

Job Titles:

• Director
• Member of the Faculty Advisory Board
• Administration
• Associate Professor of Political Science
• Director, International Studies Program
• People
• Professor

Ian Hurd is Professor of Political Science, Director of the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies, and Director of the International Studies Program at Northwestern University. The 4th Edition of his book International Organizations: Politics, Law, Practice was published in 2020. His book How to Do Things with International Law (2017) looks at the political uses of international law around war, drones, and torture to reconsider the idea of the international rule of law. His book After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the UN Security Council (2008) won the Chadwick Alger Award from the International Studies Association and the Myres McDougal Prize from the Policy Sciences Society. He is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of International Organizations (2016). His research and teaching focus on international law and politics in theory and in practice, and on political science research methods. He is a frequent contributor to public debates on global affairs, foreign policy, and international law. His work has appeared in leading academic and policy journals, including International Organization, Foreign Affairs, International Politics, Global Governance, and Ethics & International Affairs. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times and other media outlets, and he is interviewed frequently by Chicago Public Radio and the Chicago PBS station, WTTW. He has been a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, WZB in Berlin, the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, EHESS in Paris, and elsewhere.

Job Titles:

• Instructor
• People

Issrar CHAMEKH is a PhD candidate in the Political Science department and is interested in researching the politics of local governance and environmental activism. Issrar's dissertation project centers around understanding how indigenous communities in North Africa use environmentalism to assert their agency with a specific focus on the Kabyle Berber community in Algeria.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Faculty Advisory Board
• People

Jessica Winegar is a sociocultural anthropologist who specializes in cultural politics. Her body of work focuses on how people invest particular social arenas-such as art worlds, education, and political protest-with liberating potential, while at the same time re/producing hierarchies of gender, class, race/ethnicity, and generation. She is an anthropologist of the Middle East by training; her research and teaching draw on a range of disciplines and extend to how US institutions deal with the MENA region. Winegar's current book project, Counter-Revolutionary Aesthetics: How Egypt's Uprising Faltered, examines how aesthetic forms, judgments, and practices play a central role in both delegitimizing revolutionary actions and in producing everyday right-wing attachments. It is based on ethnographic research carried out in Egypt before and after the 2011 uprising. This research and writing are supported by Fulbright, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Howard Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her first book Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2006) examined the intense debates over cultural authenticity and artistic value that accompanied market liberalization in Egypt in the 1990s and early 2000s. It developed the concept of reckoning to analyze how art became a primary site for dealing with the legacies of colonialism, socialism, and modernism in a context of competing state and private market interests in culture. The book was awarded the Albert Hourani Book Award for best book in Middle East Studies and the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Book Award in African studies. Winegar's second book, co-authored with Lara Deeb, is Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (Stanford University Press, Fall 2015). The book uses Middle East anthropology as a lens through which to examine how national and global political-economic forces have enabled and constrained academic work from World War II through the War on Terror. Based on ethnography and archival research, the book highlights the generational, racialized, and gendered aspects of academic politics as they intersect with the increasing militarization and corporatization of knowledge. Winegar has also published numerous scholarly and popular articles on the 2011 uprising in Egypt, Middle Eastern visual arts and artists, U.S. media coverage of the Middle East, and on U.S. academia. Her articles have appeared in edited volumes and in publications such as American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Annual Review of Anthropology, October, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Review of Middle East Studies, Meridians, Middle East Culture and Communication, Middle East Report, Contemporary Practices, Critical Interventions and online at Jadaliyya, Ibraaz, and ArteEast. As a Public Voices Fellow of the Op-Ed Project, she published commentary on Muslims in the US, the Middle East uprisings, anthropology, and women in academia in The Hill, TruthOut, Chronicle of Higher Education, Huffington Post, and Scientific American among other publications. Winegar has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, the Howard Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has enjoyed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University, and the School for Advanced Research. At Northwestern, she is a core member of the Program in Middle East and North African Studies. This program has an undergraduate major and minor, as well as a Graduate Cluster and Certificate Program.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Faculty Advisory Board
• Associate Professor of Instruction at the Center for Legal Studies
• People

Joanna Grisinger is Associate Professor of Instruction at the Center for Legal Studies at Northwestern University, where she teaches a variety of undergraduate courses including Legal and Constitutional History of the United States, Constitutional Law, Gender and the Law, Law and Society, and Law & the Civil Rights Movement. She received her J.D. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago; her research focuses on the modern administrative state in twentieth-century U.S. legal and political history. Her first book, The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics Since the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2012), offers a political history of administrative law reform. Her current research explores public interest participation in administrative decision making; she is currently working on a book manuscript that examines airline regulation as a site for mobilization around issues of race and apartheid, disability, consumer rights, and the environment. Prof. Grisinger co-edits (with Deborah Dinner) the Legal History section of Jotwell.com, and is the advisory editor on Law and Criminology for the American National Biography Online. She is chair of the ASLH Standing Committee on the Annual Meeting and a past member of the American Society for Legal History's board of directors. She is a co-founder (with Kimberly Welch, Kathryn Schumaker, and Logan Sawyer) of the Law & History Collaborative Research Network (established 2013) within the Law and Society Association.

Job Titles:

• Program Coordinator of the Weinberg College Center for International
• Program Coordinator, WCCIAS

Margaret Sagan is Program Coordinator of the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies, handling the center's events. She joined the center in 2022. She co-authored the report "Responsible Coffee Sourcing: Towards a Living Income for Producers" in 2021, for the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI). She received her Master of International Affairs degree at Columbia University SIPA, performing field work in Malawi for the Business and Human Rights Clinic. She worked for a decade at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, where she managed visitor services, planned events including Jazz Showcase concerts and film screenings, and wrote the Close-Ups section of the Native Networks website.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Faculty Advisory Board
• People

Mark is an historical archaeologist who specializes in materiality, slavery and inequality. These key themes intersect in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Atlantic and Indian Oceans and form a foundation on his research on the African Diaspora and Colonial Contexts. As an archaeologist who studies how people adapt to landscapes of inequality and contribute to those landscapes in material ways he employs ethnohistorical, archaeological, and archaeometric approaches. His current fieldwork is based in the Eastern Caribbean and has focused on two communities in Dominica- Portsmouth and Soufriere. He also has research interests in 18 th century Southern India and 19 th century North America. He completed his PhD at Syracuse University in 2001. Research conducted for this dissertation formed the nucleus of his book An Archaeology of Black Markets. In this book I explore the ways in which everyday internal and informal trade circumvented plantation boundaries and show how the economic activities of free and enslaved peoples shaped everyday life and the material world. It was the first systematic study of pottery made and used by slaves to use compositional analysis to understand both production and distribution networks of slaves. His second book, based on research in Dominica, is tentatively entitled, Slavery and the Margins of Empire. This book is based on five years of archaeological and historical research conducted with the aid of the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. It compares the community histories and social lives of enslaved laborers on two eighteenth century sugar plantations in Dominica. I make the simple point that lives of empire's most marginal subjects could not be contained by the boundaries and identities under which they were categorized.

Job Titles:

• People

Job Titles:

• Member of the Student Advisory Board

Job Titles:

• People

Pilar is originally from Uruguay and has lived in several Latin American countries throughout her life. Now a PhD Candidate in the Political Science Department, she is researching the politics of inequality with a particular focus on preferences for redistribution and the political dynamics behind social policies. Before coming to Northwestern, she worked as a consultant in international organizations where she focused mostly on analyzing how public policies impact welfare.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Faculty Advisory Board
• People

Richard Walker's research interests are in macroeconomics and political economy; and more specifically the role of specialization, information and coordination in determining economic growth. He is also interested in economic models of conflict. He enjoys teaching monetary economics, international finance and econometrics, and leading freshman seminars on topics from financial crises to the economics of Hollywood.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Faculty Advisory Board
• People
• Professor

Professor Nelson's main research and teaching interests lie in the subfields of International and Comparative Political Economy. His recent work explores a variety of topics, including the politics that shape the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) lending policies; the structure and governance of financial markets before and after the near-collapse of the American financial system in 2008; the political dynamics of developing and emerging market countries' decisions to open their economies to international capital flows; how organizational cultures shape the behavior of international institutions; and the international organization of sovereign debt markets.

Job Titles:

• Program Assistant
• Undergraduate and Graduate Coordinator, WCCIAS

Tiffany is a Program Assistant for the Center for International and Area Studies. She supports the International Studies Program, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and Middle East and North African Studies Program. She has been at Northwestern since 2016 and was with the Program of African Studies before joining WCCIAS. She earned her M.A. in Sociology with a concentration in rural community and economic development from Western Illinois University through their graduate program for returned Peace Corps volunteers and worked with the University of Missouri Extension before coming to Northwestern. She did her Peace Corps service in Rwanda and continues to travel internationally each year.