ISITA Community: Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa

Home
People

ISITA Community

ISITA is led by faculty director Zachary Wright (based at Northwestern University in Qatar) and associate director Rebecca Shereikis (based at Northwestern University, Evanston), supported by a multi-disciplinary group of affiliated faculty on both campuses who participate in ISITA's programming and initiatives. An Advisory Board, composed mainly of external members, offers input on ISITA's strategic direction from a variety of perspectives.

For general questions, you can reach us at 847-491-2598 or isita@northwestern.edu.

Zachary Wright

Director of ISITA, Professor in Residence & Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Northwestern University in Qatar

z-wright@northwestern.edu
View Bio

ISITA's fourth director is Zachary Wright, professor in residence and associate dean for faculty affairs at Northwestern University in Qatar. Wright is a scholar of African and Islamic Studies whose research focuses on Islamic intellectual history in West and North Africa, from the fifteenth century to the present. Most of his field research based in Arabic, French, and Wolof language sources, has been conducted in Senegal and Morocco, with work also in Egypt, Mauritania, Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and South Africa. A faculty member at NU-Qatar since 2010, Wright teaches courses on Islam in Africa, African history, Islamic intellectual history, and Islamic revivalist movements.

Rebecca Shereikis

Associate Director

r-shereikis@northwestern.edu

Rebecca Shereikis (PhD, Northwestern) is ISITA's associate director. She is a historian of West Africa with interests in colonial legal institutions, African Muslim responses to colonialism, and Islamic law in African contexts. She has conducted research in Mali and Senegal on how inhabitants of western Mali navigated the legal terrain established by the French colonial state in the early twentieth century. She has published in the Journal of African History and the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures.

For ISITA, she works with the director on programming, grant writing, visitors, communications, and the Institute's web presence.

In 2026, Shereikis became the Associate Editor for the journal, Islamic Africa - a peer-reviewed academic journal launched by ISITA in 2009, and now published by Brill Academic Publishers.

Xena Amro

Graduate Assistant

xenaamro2026@u.northwestern.edu

Xena Amro is an ABD PhD candidate in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, with a home department in Middle East and North African Studies, specializing in Arabic literary traditions across premodern and modern periods, with a particular focus on the Islamic risālah (epistle) as a site of intellectual, bureaucratic, and literary knowledge production.

Since 2022, she has contributed to manuscript-centered research and pedagogy as a graduate assistant at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), where she works on the digital preservation of rare Islamic manuscripts, including transcription and translation projects. Her research brings together manuscript studies, genre theory, and intellectual history.

In 2025, she was awarded a Residential Doctoral Fellowship at the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB), part of the Max Weber Foundation of German Humanities Institutes Abroad. She was previously awarded the Paris Program in Critical Theory Fellowship at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris III, as well as the John Hunwick Research Fund from ISITA.