#IAS_NUQ Global Postdoctoral Scholars

Angela Haddad is a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (#IAS_NUQ). Her research works across Arabic, Spanish, and French traditions and examines the ethno-racial and social imaginaries that emerged outside direct colonial rule but across and within disparate empires, nationalisms, and transregional encounters. She received her PhD from New York University in the field of Comparative Literature in August 2025.

Her dissertation “Arab Print Culture and the Mahjar in the Caribbean, 1900–1940” traces the literary and political connections between the Arab eastern Mediterranean and Caribbean, particularly through the writings of Arab migrants in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. Her essay, “Chronicling ‘the Death of the Arab’ in Colombian Literature,” appears in Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. She is also a literary translator from Arabic into English.

At #IAS_NUQ, Haddad will develop her dissertation into a monograph on Arab Caribbean textual production, incorporating fragile and previously inaccessible materials through a restoration and digitization initiative. She will also begin a new project on Arab travel writing and its role in shaping early South–South intellectual and aesthetic exchanges.

Jowel Choufani is a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar. She is an anthropologist whose research examines state abandonment, community-based solidarity infrastructures, and the moral and political economies that shape them. She received her PhD in anthropology from George Washington University in 2026.

Her dissertation, Negotiating Obligation Amidst Organized Abandonment: Relatedness and Belonging in Contemporary Lebanon, is an ethnographic study of how people connected to Lebanon mobilize and enact obligations, including wajeb, an Arabic term that spans political, relational, and religious registers. Through digital media and material provisioning networks, including community kitchens, the project examines how these practices become a terrain for negotiating belonging and building solidarity while, at times, reproducing exclusion.

At #IAS_NUQ, Choufani will develop her dissertation into a monograph by expanding its historical dimension to trace ruptures and continuities in the ways wajeb has been constituted and circulated across key moments in Lebanon’s history. She will also begin a new project examining how traditional food preserves, or mouneh, are being transformed into politically charged commodities through elite-led markets in Lebanon that merge humanitarian relief, cultural heritage, and corporate infrastructures in the name of national protectionism.

Aya Labanieh is a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar. She received her PhD in English and comparative literature from Columbia University in 2025 and is an affiliate of EUME and SYRASP at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Her research examines the intertwinement of conspiracy, memory, and power in Anglophone and Arabophone literatures and media spheres, spanning dystopian fiction, internet subcultures, and the memoirs of agents and spies. She has published in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of Medical Humanities, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, as well as public-facing venues such as Aeon and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Labanieh also has scholarly and artistic interests in heritage studies and Babylonian antiquity. She has spearheaded projects with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and is currently editing the multilingual anthology Born in Babylon: Middle Eastern Poets on Migration and Antiquity, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press.

Labanieh's project uses conspiracy as both an object of study and an analytical framework for understanding the relationship between colonial history and cultural memory in the 20th-century Middle East. Foregrounding the dual function of conspiracy as both a historical event and fictional narrative, the project traces the interplay between episodes of colonial intervention and their media afterlives across a broad corpus of fiction, poetry, cinema, art, and journalism.

At #IAS_NUQ, Labanieh will develop her dissertation into a monograph by adding a final chapter that examines the transformation of the conspiracy trope during the transition from colonial subjects to state citizens and the rise of autocratic Arab security regimes. Focusing on Baathist Syria and Iraq from the 1970s through the 1990s, she will examine media narratives surrounding regime informants and how dissidents deployed the rhetoric of conspiracy under conditions of surveillance and exile.

Osman Osman is a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar. He earned his PhD in media, culture, and communication from New York University and a master's degree from The Media School at Indiana University Bloomington. His research sits at the intersection of critical security studies and the sociology of news production, examining how journalistic fields in postcolonial contexts construct and circulate narratives about conflict and politics and how African media discourses understand and represent themselves. His work contributes to the fields of media and communication, sociology, critical security studies, and African studies, with publications in Journalism Studies, African Journalism Studies, and Media, War & Conflict. Before joining NU-Q, he taught in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. His scholarship is also informed by more than a decade of professional experience as a journalist across several African countries, where he reported on conflict and political affairs for outlets including Al Jazeera English, CNN, Quartz Africa, and Kenya's Daily Nation.

Osman's project, Manufacturing Empire: Journalistic Construction of Somalia in Postcolonial Kenya, introduces the concept of client journalism to explain how news institutions across both authoritarian and liberalized media environments remain structurally tethered to state power. 

Drawing on archival research, content analysis, and interviews with journalists, the project traces the genealogy through which Kenyan news media portray Muslim communities in Kenya and Somalia as security threats. It shows how these narratives emerged from British colonial security logics that cast populations as threats to order, were institutionalized by the postcolonial Kenyan state, and continue to shape contemporary media coverage of the war on terror.

At #IAS_NUQ, Osman will develop his dissertation into a book manuscript examining the relationship between journalism, state power, and security discourse in postcolonial Kenya. During his fellowship, he will expand the manuscript's conceptual framing of client journalism and further situate Kenyan media narratives within broader debates on empire, postcolonial governance, and knowledge production in the Global South.

Mariam Karim is a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (#IAS_NUQ). She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information (iSchool) and the Women and Gender Studies Institute (WGSI). She served as an inaugural graduate fellow at the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative and was the recipient of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral award. She holds an Honours BA in Visual Culture & Communications from the University of Toronto and a MA in Cultural Studies & Critical Theory from McMaster University. She situates contemporary uses of digital media through historical inquiry and studies Arabic mass media in the context of media imperialism and colonialism. To do this, she follows Arab women's expansive mass media practices, contributions, and ideas from the 20th century as central points of reference. Her interests lie at the intersections of multilingual media, information, gender, political theory, translation, infrastructure, historical, archival, visual, and literary studies, and decolonization.

Chafic Najem is a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (#IAS_NUQ). He received his PhD in Media and Communication Studies from Stockholm University, complemented by a post-master's degree from the Royal Institute of Art, Sweden. Both his MA and BA degrees are from the American University of Beirut. Chafic's research examines prisoners' illicit media practices and the smuggling and use of digital media technologies into carceral spaces, particularly in Lebanon. He deals with questions of social movements and mobilization, media witnessing and amateur-recorded testimonies, and visual culture in relation to political and media practices in and from carceral spaces. His scholarly contributions span diverse areas such as media and communication, documentary studies, and artistic research, including recent publications in Media, Culture, and Society and Panoptikum. Prior to joining NU-Q, he held teaching roles at Stockholm University, Uppsala University, and Södertörn University. Chafic's postdoctoral position is funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York through the Institute's Arab Information and Media Studies (AIMS) project. 

Harsha Man Maharjan is a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South, Northwestern University, Qatar. He holds a Ph.D. from Kyoto University, specializing in interdisciplinary fields, including media studies and science and technology studies. He has over 15 years of experience in research on media, digital/technology policies, and practices in Nepal. He has worked as a senior researcher at Martin Chautari in Kathmandu. He has co-authored two books and co-edited three more in Nepali. His work on media/digital practices, development communication, media/digital policy, and media history has been published in various international and national journals and books. He has taught courses on mass communication theories, South Asian media, and media research at two universities in Nepal. From December 2020 to May 2023, he worked as an Academic/Research Head at Polygon College in Nepal. He is interested in critical data/digital studies, media studies, infrastructure studies, and science and technology studies. He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Communication, Culture & Critique and Samaj Adhyayan, and is researching national digital identification in Nepal to understand the relationship of data/digital systems to governance, global economy, citizenship, and social change.