Postdoctoral Scholars

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.

Angela Haddad is a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (#IAS_NUQ). She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University and a doctoral fellow at the Orient-Institut Beirut. Her research explores comparative literary modernities through transregional and multilingual frameworks, with a focus on Syro-Lebanese writers who migrated to the Caribbean at the turn of the twentieth century.

Working across Arabic, Spanish, and French traditions, Haddad examines ethno-racial and social imaginaries that emerged outside direct colonial rule but across and within disparate empires, nationalisms, and transregional encounters. Her dissertation traces the literary and political connections between the Mediterranean and Caribbean, particularly through the writings of Arab migrants in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. Her recent 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.