WEINBERG COLLEGE CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL AND AREA STUDIES

Visiting Scholars of Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies

Current Visiting Scholars of Weinberg college center of international and area studies

Ian Kelly

Visiting Scholar of Weinberg College Center of International and Area Studies

Visiting Fall Quarter 2025

Ian Kelly is serving as the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor in International Studies in fall 2025. Ambassador Kelly has served as Ambassador (ret.) in Residence at Northwestern and a member of the International Studies Program since 2018. A retired senior Foreign Service officer, Kelly served as US Ambassador to Georgia from 2015 to 2018 and as U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) from 2010 to 2013. He previously held senior roles at the U.S. Department of State, including Department Spokesman under Secretary Hillary Clinton and Director of the Office of Russian Affairs. Before his diplomatic service, he earned a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Columbia University. At Northwestern, Kelly currently teaches courses on Foreign Aid and U.S. Foreign Policy. In fall quarter, he is teaching a course called "Fall of USSR / Rise of Russia."

Maria Lipman

Visiting Scholar of Weinberg College Center of International and Area Studies

Visiting Winter Quarter 2026

Maria Lipman will serve as the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor in International Studies in winter 2026. Lipman is a political analyst and commentator whose work focuses on state‑society relations, media, and the politics of history in Russia. Her recent publications in Foreign Affairs include co‑authored articles such as “The Limits of Putin’s Balancing Act: What the Kremlin Will Sacrifice in Pursuit of Victory in Ukraine” and “Exiles Cannot Save Russia: But the West Can Learn From—and Should Support—Those Who Fled Putin” as well as “Forever Putinism: The Russian Autocrat’s Answer to the Problem of Succession.” Lipman has served as editor or deputy editor of various Russian‑ and English‑language publications over the past three decades. From 2003 to 2014, she was an associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center, where she edited the journal Pro et Contra. She is a frequent commentator in international broadcast media and has written extensively on Russian affairs for both Russian and U.S. outlets, including The Washington Post (2001–2011) and The New Yorker online (2012–2017). Lipman taught courses on contemporary Russia at Indiana University (Bloomington) and Grinnell College (Iowa) from 2017–2019.

Alumni of Weinberg College Center of International and Area Studies

Ron Deibert

Alumni of Weinberg College Center of International and Area Studies

Visited Spring Quarter 2025

Ron Deibert served as the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Department of Sociology during the Spring 2025 quarter. Deibert is a Professor in Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The Citizen Lab is a multifaceted laboratory emphasizing information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security research, featuring over 160 reports on cyber espionage, spyware, and internet censorship. Deibert also co-founded OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor, which investigate internet censorship and surveillance, and is a founder and former Vice President of Global Policy and Outreach of Psiphon, a tool that helps users bypass internet censorship. He has been presented with numerous awards, including the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario.

Rana Kazkaz

Alumni of Weinberg College Center of International and Area Studies

Visited Fall Quarter 2021

Rana Kazkaz, an award-winning filmmaker, is an assistant professor of communication in residence at Northwestern Qatar where she teaches narrative filmmaking. Kazkaz’s films have been recognized at the world’s leading film festivals including Cannes, Sundance, and Toronto. With a focus on Syrian stories, her producing, screenwriting, and directing portfolio includes Mare Nostrum (2016) which has been selected in over 100 international film festivals and won more than 40 awards; Searching for the Translator, a documentary (2016); Deaf Day (2011) and Kemo Sabe (2007). Her first feature film The Translator (2020) won several grants and development awards including the Arte Award at L’Atelier de la Cinefondation at the Cannes Film Festival (2017), the CNC Award at Meetings on the Bridge at the Istanbul Film Festival (2017), and a Tribeca Alumni Grant (2018). The Translator has been selected in numerous international festivals and was distributed internationally in 2021. Her current film projects include Honest Politics and The Foolishness of God: My Forgiveness Journey with Desmond Tutu. She is a member of the Académie des César.

Julio César Guanche Zaldívar

Alumni of Weinberg College Center of International and Area Studies

Visited Spring Quarter 2019 and Fall Quarter 2021

Julio César Guanche Zaldívar, a renowned legal and political historian of modern Cuba, served as the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Department of History during the Spring 2019 and Fall 2021 quarters. Guanche came to the department with experience teaching in Havana, Spain and Ecuador and on the heels of a visiting position at Harvard. His work focuses on republicanism, populism, and constitutional law. For his project underway during his visiting professorship, he studied the ideas, conflicts, actors, and repertoires of control and contestation that revolve around the pillars of a democratic understanding of republicanism.

Richard S. Williamson

Alumni of Weinberg College Center of International and Area Studies

Visited Fall Quarter 2009 and Winter Quarter 2010

Richard S. Williamson was the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in fall 2009 and winter 2010. A partner in the international law firm of Winston & Strawn LLP, he has a wide range of government and academic experience. Ambassador Williamson recently completed an assignment as the President’s Special Envoy to Sudan. Earlier, he served in the Reagan White House as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy to the Chief of Staff and then on the White House senior staff as Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs. His many diplomatic posts have included serving as Ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna (including the International Atomic Energy Agency); Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs; a member of the President’s General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Ambassador Williamson has been an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware Law School and the Sharkey Visiting Scholar on United Nations Studies at the Whitehead School of International Relations, Seton Hall University. He is editor of three books and the author of over 180 articles and seven books, most recently American Primacy and Multilateral Cooperation. He received his AB from Princeton University and his JD from the University of Virginia School of Law where he served as Executive Editor of The Virginia Journal of International Law.

Valeria Coronel

Alumni of Weinberg College Center of International and Area Studies

Visited Winter Quarter 2024 and Spring Quarter 2025

Valeria Coronel (FLACSO Ecuador) residency at Northwestern.

Andean Cultures & Histories and Latin American & Caribbean Studies, homed in the Weinberg College Center for International and Areas Studies at Northwestern University, are pleased to announce historian Valeria Coronel as the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Winter and Spring quarters 2025.

Valeria Coronel is a senior research professor at FLACSO Ecuador in Quito. In the Department of Sociology and Gender Studies and the doctoral program in History at FLACSO, she has contributed to the formation of interdisciplinary academic areas at the juncture of Andean history, historical sociology, and Latin American critical theory. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of History at New York University.

In her research, she has studied the Andean Baroque within the framework of critical theory examining Counter-Reformation religiosity and colonial mercantilism in the 17th century. Her recent publications have focused on the study of the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular emphasis on the politics and philosophy of democratic republicanism in the northern Andes. Her book, La última guerra del siglo de las luces, revolución liberal y republicanismo popular en Ecuador (2022), addresses the languages and strategies of popular power accumulation in the Radical Party and analyzes the revitalizations of democratic republicanism towards the configuration of political rights and the discourse on property in a radical republic. Her studies examine the tensions of democratic hegemony in a context of postcolonial nation formation in a historical cycle marked by the rise and crisis of the world market. Her studies include approaches to Latin American modernism and the avant-garde, critical traditions, and the plebeian public sphere. Her most recent publications delve into the political imagination and transformative capacity of the interwar left in Latin America.

Valeria Coronel has promoted interdisciplinary and international collaboration groups for the study of the contemporary global crisis with a focus on authoritarian and democratic transitions in the present. She is a founding member of “Red crítica populismo, republicanismo y crisis global.” She was a Senior Fellow based at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico (2021) where she co-directed the interdisciplinary project “Regulation and Deregulation of Wealth in Latin America” under the auspices of the Maria Sybila Merian Center for Advanced Studies (CALAS) supported by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

As part of her work at Northwestern University, she will teach a graduate seminar titled "Crisis, Contentious Politics, and Critical Thought in Latin America" in Winter 2025. In February, she will participate in "A Conversation on Humanities in the Public/Cultural Sphere" at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, discussing her work as an academic who has ventured into what she proposes as a postcolonial public policy in her former role as Metropolitan Secretary of Culture of Quito 2023-2024. In the Spring quarter, she will participate in the conference Thinking Andean Studies, present a lecture on her latest book, Lo Nacional Popular en Ecuador y la Izquierda de Entreguerras (FCE 2025), and present her current project. During her stay, Professor Coronel will conduct archival research in Chicago on the formation of area studies and the impact of cultural relativism in the early Cold War period. She will also engage undergraduate and graduate students across Latin American studies at Northwestern. Finally, Professor Coronel will explore possibilities for future, sustained academic and research collaborations between Northwestern and FLACSO Ecuador.

Mkhaimar Abusada is a visiting lecturer in residence from October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2025. An Associate Professor of Political Science at Al-Azhar University-Gaza and the former chair of the university's political science department, Mkhaimar’s primary research topics include Palestinian politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He received his PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia.