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ISITA Community

Below, find information about our leadership and the affiliated faculty, including faculty at Northwestern University in Qatar, who participate in ISITA's programming and initiatives. 

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

Zachary Wright

Zachary Wright

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

z-wright@northwestern.edu
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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

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.

Xena Amro

Xena Amro

Graduate Assistant

Xena Amro is a second-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies, with a home department in Middle East and North African Studies. She is a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Global Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies. Her research interests include Islamic manuscripts, travelogues, global modernism, translation studies, modern Arabic literature, and twentieth-century European novels. 

Xena has a bachelor's degree in English Literature from the Lebanese American University and a master's degree in English Literature from the American University of Beirut. Her master's thesis, entitled, “Paris in 1855 and 1922: Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq and James Joyce,” employed global modernist theories to investigate how Al-Sāq ‘alā l-sāq (Leg over Leg) already accomplishes many things claimed for one of the central texts of modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), such as experiments in narrative form, its polyglot linguistic texture, and breadth of cultural and literary references. Her research focused on the concept of foreignness, whereby a native language is made foreign to its own readers. She has a chapter contribution in an edited volume on al-Shidyāq to be published soon with Barbara Winckler in Reichert Verlag.