Meet the 2025-26 Global Fellows

Mostafa Minawi is a professor of history at Cornell University. His research explores the intimacies of global history through the lens of Ottoman imperialism and inter-imperial competition in Central and Northeastern Africa, Southwest Asia, and Southeastern Europe, with a focus on archival sources from the Global South.

Minawi is the author of The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy from the Sahara to the Hijaz (Stanford University Press, 2016) and Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire (Stanford University Press, 2022), which was co-awarded the Albert Hourani Book Prize. His work spans international law, late 19th-century imperialism, and microhistory, and has been supported by fellowships in Turkey, Lebanon, Germany, and the United States. He has taught in the United States, South Korea, and Lebanon, and is currently working on his third monograph, The Global History of a Roof Top in Jerusalem at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Geopolitics of Imperialism from Palestine to the Horn of Africa.

During his fellowship at #IAS_NUQ, Minawi will work on a chapter examining Italian-Ethiopian-Ottoman relations between 1885 and 1914, linking politics of religious protection in Jerusalem to imperial dynamics in the Horn of Africa.

Sara Mourad is an assistant professor of media studies at the American University of Beirut. She is a writer, teacher, and scholar of gender, media, and Arab public cultures. Her research examines the cultural politics of sexuality and the histories and epistemologies of contemporary feminist thought. 

Her work, published in both English and Arabic, spans academic journals, edited volumes, and media and literary platforms. Mourad received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She was a Global Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality in 2018 and a 2021–22 EUME Fellow at the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin. She is currently completing her first monograph,An Intimate History of Debt and Inheritance in Postwar Lebanon. 

At #IAS_NUQ, Mourad will work on her book-in-progress, The Skull in the Attic, which examines the family home as both a place and an archive, exploring how ruptures within the family and the nation shape alternative forms of belonging in postwar Lebanon.

Asri Saraswati is an assistant professor in the English Studies Program at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Indonesia. She is also an affiliate lecturer in the American Studies Program and a research fellow at the Asia Research Centre at UI. Her work focuses on postcoloniality and transnationality in literature and culture, with particular attention to race, gender, and cultural politics in Indonesia. 

Saraswati’s research examines knowledge production, class and gender, mobility, and the politics of representation in postcolonial contexts. Her recent publication, “Fraught Relations: Indonesian Modest Fashion, New York Catwalks, and the Spectacle of Travel,” appears in Gender, Islam and Sexuality in Contemporary Indonesia (2024). In addition to academic work, she writes for public platforms such as Kompas, Warscapes, Indonesia at Melbourne, Anotasi, and THE Campus.

As part of her fellowship at #IAS_NUQ, Saraswati will work on her book manuscript Navigating Cold War Cultural Politics: Literary Aesthetics of Indonesian Sojourn Writers, which explores how Cold War-era transnational literary networks shaped knowledge production and aesthetics in Indonesia.

Téwodros Workneh is an associate professor of global communication at the School of Communication Studies at Kent State University. His research engages global media industries and policies through the lenses of critical political economy and postcolonial theory.

Workneh’s scholarship examines both the historical and contemporary dynamics of state–media relations in Ethiopia and within the Ethiopian diaspora, with a particular focus on policymaking, legislative frameworks, and regulatory environments. His recent work extends into cultural studies, interrogating culinary adventure reality television and the representation of African destinations and foodways in global media. His articles have appeared in leading interdisciplinary journals, including International Journal of Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, Journalism Studies, Review of African Political Economy, Information, Communication & Society, and Media, Culture & Society. He is also the co-editor of Counter-Terrorism Laws and Freedom of Expression: Global Perspectives and has contributed multiple chapters to edited volumes. 

As part of his fellowship at #IAS_NUQ, Workneh will examine how Ethiopian and Eritrean communities in the Gulf, particularly in the UAE and Qatar, use digital media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and internet radio to engage with and shape political discourses related to their homelands.