FACULTY
Ibrahim N. Abusharif
IBRAHIM N. ABUSHARIF, MS, is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Qatar. He received his MSJ from Medill in 1986. Since then, he has worked as a journalist, magazine editor, writer, publisher, book editor and designer, translator, and teacher for some 22 years. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News, Foreword Magazine, Beliefnet.com, TheRevealer.org, and other print and online publications. He is also a published writer of fiction and a scriptwriter. Prior to studying journalism, he earned undergraduate degrees zoology and physiology, and has worked at the University of Chicago Medical Center as a research assistant and a lab instructor in neuroanatomy.
To e-mail this person, click here.
Christopher Booker
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER, MA, is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Qatar. He teaches video and multimedia journalism. Outside of Medill he regularly works as freelance video journalist for Slate & Time.com. In addition, he is a freelance audio producer for NPR's Hearing Voices. Prior to joining Northwestern, he worked as a video and multimedia journalist for the Chicago Tribune were he wrote, produced, shot and edited video and multimedia content for the paper's website and broadcast partners. In addition, he wrote for the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Books, National and Perspective sections. This past March Booker was awarded the “Multimedia Portfolio of the Year” award from the Illinois Press Photographers Association. He was also awarded a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant and will be travelling to Greenland to document the cultural changes taking place amongst the Inuit Eskimo populations due to climate change. To see some of his work, you may visit his website - http://www.cgbooker.com
To e-mail this person, click here.
Aspen Brinton
ASPEN BRINTON, Ph.D., is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in Qatar. After receiving her Bachelor's degree in History from Amherst College, she received both a Master's in German and European Studies and a Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University. Previous to joining NU-Q, she taught history of political thought at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Qatar. Her research is in the field of political theory, including the history of political thought, democratic theory, and theories of civil society.
To e-mail this person, click here.
Brian Cagle
BRIAN CAGLE, Lecturer in Radio/Television/Film, is a filmmaker. Cagle spent much of his life in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and many of his works explore the peculiar geographic and social realities associated with the American “Deep South”. His films have been screened at a number of museums and film festivals around the Southeastern United States, such as Downstream International Film Festival (Georgia), IndieGrits (North Carolina), and IndieMemphis (Tennessee); he has also been featured in solo screenings at The Hunter Museum of American Art and the Chattanooga Regional History Museum. In 2003 he received a grant to create “No Incident, No Service,” a documentary film based upon the experiences of area Civil Rights demonstrators; that film is now part of the permanent collection of the Chattanooga Regional History Museum. In 2006 his short film, “Bikes + Bridges = Chicago” won the top prize in Nokia’s “My Chicago, My Neighborhood” film competition. Cagle received his MFA in Film from Northwestern University; and between 2006 and his joining the NU-Q faculty, he taught a variety of courses in media aesthetics, theory and production on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus.
To e-mail this person, click here.
David E. Gray
DAVID E. GRAY, MS, is a Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy at Northwestern University in Qatar. He is also currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. He holds Bachelor's degrees in Philosophy and Computer Science from the University of Montana, a Master's Degree in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University, and is finishing a Ph.D. dissertation in Logic, Computation, and Methodology at Carnegie Mellon University as well. His research areas include democratic theory, social choice theory, value pluralism, and approaches to clinical trial design.
To e-mail this person, click here.
Janet Key
JANET KEY, MS, Assistant Professor of journalism, worked more than 25 years as a journalist for some of the world’s most respected news outlets, including United Press International, Newsweek, The New York Times, Business Week and the Chicago Tribune, before turning to academia. She has extensive experience in national, international -- including Northern Ireland and the Middle East -- and financial reporting. A reporting assignment in the Middle East, which began in Beirut and took her to the Arabian Gulf, sparked a lifelong passion for the region. A stint as an adjunct professor at the Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in the United States started her career in academia. Before coming now to Northwestern/Medill-Qatar, Key combined her interests by teaching journalism at the American University in Cairo for seven years, pioneering its multi-media journalism labs, heading its teaching newspaper and co-authoring its new convergent journalism curriculum.
To e-mail this person, click here.
John Laprise
JOHN LAPRISE, Ph.D., is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in Qatar. After receiving Bachelor’s degrees in History, Religion, and Interdisciplinary Studies, he went on to study Arabic Language at the Arabic Language Institute at the American University in Cairo and received a Master’s degree in War Studies from King’s College London. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University for his interdisciplinary research examining computer adoption and information policy in the White Houses of the 1970’s. He has also worked for over ten years in the private sector as a research consultant to Fortune 500 companies.
To e-mail this person, click here.
Hamid Naficy
HAMID NAFICY, Ph.D., John Evans Professor of Communication, is a leading authority on cinema and television in the Middle East and on exile and diaspora, who has produced many educational films and experimental videos. He has published extensively about theories of exile and displacement, exilic and diaspora cinema and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas. His many publications include such well-known titles as An Accented Cinema, The Making of Exile Cultures, Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged, Iran Media Index, and the AFI anthology, Home, Exile, Homeland. He received his Ph.D. in Critical Studies of Film and Television at UCLA.
To e-mail this person, click here.
Patricia A. Roth
PATRICIA A. ROTH, MA, is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in Qatar. Roth received her master's degree and completed doctoral coursework at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her studies and research focus on public relations, with emphases on higher education and fundraising. Roth's professional career spans print journalism, public relations, teaching English and journalism, and fundraising. Prior to her assistant professorship at Northwestern, Roth served as a fundraising professional at several American universities, including the University of Maryland at College Park, Loyola University Chicago and Duke University. She also served as a senior consultant with an American firm specializing in advancement planning, fundraising and marketing communications.
To e-mail this person, click here.
James Schwoch
JAMES SCHWOCH, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication. Schwoch received his PhD and MA from Northwestern, and his BA from the University of Wisconsin. His teaching and research areas include global media, diplomacy, media history, international studies, science and technology studies, global security, telecommunication policy, and research methodologies. In 2008, the University of Illinois Press published his fifth book, Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946-1969. Schwoch has also published about fifty articles, reviews and reports; received research funding from the NSF, NEH, Ford Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission (Germany 1997, Finland 2005); held a resident fellowship at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC (1997-98) and visiting professorships in Finland (1994, 1996, 2005); advised and consulted with various government agencies and ministries from several nations; and chaired about twenty PhD dissertations and undergraduate honors theses at Northwestern’s Evanston campus.
To e-mail this person, click here.
Christopher Sparshott
CHRISTOPHER SPARSHOTT, Ph.D. is a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow at Northwestern University in Qatar and Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. After receiving his Bachelor’s degree in History from Oxford University, he received a Masters and a Ph.D. in Early American History from Northwestern University. His research is in the field of British Empire, focusing on the eighteen-century Atlantic World and its culmination in the American Revolution. He has taught a wide range of courses in Early American, British Imperial and World history. In his teaching, he emphasizes the importance of using a wide range of historical material in order for students to understand the discipline of history as well as particular subject material.
Tim Wilkerson
TIM WILKERSON, MFA, is an award winning filmmaker whose work has been seen both nationally in the U.S. and internationally via television, DVD, the Internet, and in over thirty international film festivals. As a professional cinematographer he has worked with clients ranging from IBM, Ford Motor Company, The International Red Cross, Caterpillar Tractor, State Farm Insurance, and The National Association of Broadcasters. In his more personal filmic work, Tim has concentrated on short narrative, experimental and documentary projects. In 1993, he received a B.A. in Cinema and Photography from Southern Illinois University. After a year and a half studying cinema production in Cairo, Egypt as a Fulbright Fellow, he returned to the States and graduated in 2002 with an MFA in Radio-TV-Film production and theory from the University of Texas at Austin. At Austin he was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow (the Arts and Humanities equivalent of the National Science Foundation Fellowship).
For the first five years of his professional academic career, he taught video production at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. Currently he is an assistant professor at Northwestern University in Qatar. His most recent project has been purchased by Al Jazeera Documentary and International Channels for international satellite broadcast, and is a feature length documentary about a twenty-five year long, anti-nuclear peace vigil in front of the White House.
To e-mail this person, click here.
Ann Woodworth
ANN WOODWORTH, MA, is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication. Woodworth received her B.S. and M.A. Northwestern and studied privately with master teacher, Alvina Krause. She has worked professionally as an actress, director, and as a teaching consultant conducting numerous presentations of her workshop, The Classroom as Stage. Thirty-five years of experience in teaching acting, mime, and movement have included invitations to work with the Teatro Cadafe and La Compania Nacional in Caracas, Venezuela, and the British/American Drama Academy in England, where she taught for seven summers with English artists such as Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons, Vanessa Redgrave, and Alan Rickman, as well as members of the Berliner Ensemble and the Moscow Art Theatre. In 1989, Woodworth established a directing collaboration with movement director Dawn Mora, integrating movement techniques and original musical composition into a physical approach to classical texts, including Medea, Iphigenia in Aulis, Hecuba, Hamlet, King Lear, Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull. She is also a founding member of the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, under contract for an acting book, ACTING: The Study of Life, and a recipient of numerous teaching awards including the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship for Teaching Excellence.
To e-mail this person, click here.