7 scholars selected for NUQ’s Global South research programmes

Seven distinguished scholars from prestigious institutions across the globe will join Northwestern University in Qatar's Institute for Advanced Study (NUQ's IAS_NUQ) during the 2026-27 academic year, bolstering the university's status as a global nexus for research, discourse, and knowledge creation on the Global South. Jowel Choufani, Aya Labanieh, and Osman Osman will assume roles as Global Postdoctoral Scholars, while Larissa Buchholz, Geraldo Campos, Ozge Calafato, and Teddy Workneh will serve as Global Fellows, engaging in shorter-term residencies.

The IAS_NUQ Global Fellowship and Global Postdoctoral Scholars programs are vital components of the Institute's mission to foster a robust, interdisciplinary community of scholars dedicated to exploring the complexities of the Global South. The Global Postdoctoral Scholars program offers long-term appointments, enabling early-career researchers to delve into historically informed, theoretically grounded research and media production, all while contributing to program development, teaching, public scholarship, and publications via NUQ_Press.

Conversely, the Global Fellowship program provides established and emerging scholars with dedicated time and space to advance ongoing projects, engaging with the broader intellectual community at NUQ. Marwan M Kraidy, dean and CEO of NUQ, emphasized the university's responsibility to generate and expand the types of knowledge that matter, highlighting the cohort's commitment to challenging conventional thinking and broadening global understanding.

Choufani, an anthropologist, will examine state abandonment, community-based infrastructures of solidarity, and the moral and political economies that shape them, expanding her dissertation into a monograph and initiating a new project on traditional food preserves as politically charged commodities. Labanieh's research focuses on the intersections of conspiracy, memory, and power in Anglophone and Arabophone literature and media, exploring how conspiracy evolved from a colonial legacy to an emblem of autocratic rule.

Osman's work bridges critical security studies and the sociology of news production, analyzing how journalistic fields in postcolonial contexts construct narratives of conflict and power and how African media represent themselves. The Global Fellows will explore cultural markets, cinematic relations between Latin America and the Arab world, vernacular photographs shaping transnational memory and diasporic belonging, and digital memory and urban erasure in Addis Ababa.

The 2026-27 cohort underscores NUQ's IAS_NUQ's ambition to cultivate a global scholarly community where ideas traverse disciplines, regions, and cultures, fostering sustained exchanges across generations, disciplines, and regions.