
Zachary Wright
Director of ISITA, Professor in Residence & Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Northwestern University in Qatar
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.
Director of ISITA, Professor in Residence & Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Northwestern University in Qatar
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.
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.
Associate Professor in Residence, Northwestern University in Qatar
Associate Professor of Political Science; ISITA Director, 2017-2025
Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs, The Block Museum of Art; Professor Practice in Anthropology
Assistant Professor in Residence, Northwestern University in Qatar
Associate Professor of History; ISITA Interim Director, 2015-2016
Professor of Anthropology; ISITA Interim Director, 2016-2017
Assistant Professor in Residence, Northwestern University in Qatar
Director of ISITA, Professor in Residence & Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Northwestern University in Qatar