New faculty bring expertise in AI, digital media, environmental humanities, and writing to Northwestern Qatar

Four new appointments expand teaching and scholarship across the Communication and Liberal Arts programs.

Northwestern University in Qatar is expanding its faculty with four new appointments whose work engages some of the defining questions shaping media, technology, culture, and society today—from artificial intelligence and mobile communication to environmental media and the evolving role of writing in a rapidly changing information landscape.

Chafic Najem and Demet Yigitbilek join Northwestern Qatar at the start of the 2026–27 academic year, while Ghaleb Attrache and Mona Hedayati will join the faculty in January 2027. Together, their appointments strengthen teaching and scholarship across the Communication and Liberal Arts programs and expand the perspectives available to students studying media and communication in and from the Global South.

“These appointments align to Northwestern Qatar’s value of academic excellence, reflecting our ambition to build a distinctive intellectual community that is grounded in the Global South while engaging with some of the most consequential questions shaping our world,” said Marwan M. Kraidy, dean and CEO of Northwestern Qatar.

“From artificial intelligence and digital media to environmental change and writing, these are forces transforming how we understand, communicate, and shape human experience. Bringing these scholars into our community advances our commitment to excellence, collaboration, and evidence-based storytelling, while preparing our students not merely to navigate change, but to help shape it with knowledge, creativity, and purpose.”

Understanding Arab digital life

Chafic Najem is an assistant professor in residence with a joint appointment across Communication and Liberal Arts programs, bringing expertise in Arab digital media and mobile communication studies.

His teaching and scholarship will contribute to Northwestern Qatar’s growing engagement with digital cultures and communication in the Arab world, examining how mobile technologies and digital platforms intersect with everyday life, social relations, culture, and communication practices.

At a time when digital platforms increasingly mediate how communities communicate, create, participate, and understand the world around them, Najem’s appointment will provide students with opportunities to investigate these transformations from perspectives grounded in the region.

Connecting environmental change, media, and technology

Joining the Liberal Arts program in January 2027, Ghaleb Attrache will serve as assistant professor in residence with a focus on environmental humanities and media technologies.

Working at the intersection of environmental thought, culture, and technology, Attrache will expand opportunities for students to consider how media technologies shape relationships between people, environments, infrastructures, and the natural world.

His appointment also brings humanistic perspectives to questions that are increasingly important across the Global South: how environmental change is represented and understood, how technologies mediate relationships with the environment, and how culture influences responses to ecological challenges.

Questioning the assumptions behind artificial intelligence

Mona Hedayati will join the Communication Program as assistant professor in residence in January 2027, strengthening Northwestern Qatar’s expanding teaching and scholarship on artificial intelligence through humanistic and critical approaches to emerging technologies.

An interdisciplinary artist-researcher whose work brings together creative computation via performance and sound, science and technology studies, and critical theory, Hedayati examines the relationships between humans, machines, data, and embodied experience. Her research-creation has critically explored affective computing and its technological apparatus which seeks to interpret human emotions through data.

At Northwestern Qatar, her work will contribute to a growing institutional conversation that approaches AI not simply as a technological development, but as a cultural, political, ethical, and creative phenomenon. Her appointment will offer students new ways of asking who designs intelligent systems, what assumptions are encoded within them, whose experiences they represent, and how emerging technologies might be imagined differently.

Reimagining writing in a changing media landscape

Demet Yigitbilek joins the Liberal Arts Program as lecturer in residence in writing studies, adding further depth to Northwestern Qatar’s emphasis on writing as fundamental to intellectual inquiry, communication, and storytelling.

Her appointment strengthens writing instruction across the undergraduate experience and recognizes the continuing importance of clear, rigorous, and purposeful writing at a moment when the ways people produce and encounter text are being transformed by digital platforms and generative technologies.

Through her teaching, Yigitbilek will support students in developing writing not only as a means of communication, but as a process of critical thinking, inquiry, argument, and discovery—skills that remain central across journalism, communication, research, and creative practice.

The appointments build on Northwestern Qatar’s continued investment in a faculty community that combines disciplinary depth with intellectual exchange across fields. Together, the new faculty will broaden the University’s capacity to examine consequential questions at the intersection of media, technology, culture, and society while giving students new approaches to understanding, and contributing to, a changing world.