Administration

Jessica Winegar
Director and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Middle East and North African Studies Program

Jessica Winegar is the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Chair in Middle Eastern Studies and Professor of Anthropology. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who specializes in cultural politics. Her body of work focuses on how people invest particular social arenas—such as art worlds, education, and political protest—with liberating potential, while at the same time re/producing hierarchies of gender, class, race/ethnicity, and generation. She is an anthropologist of the Middle East by training; her research and teaching draw on a range of disciplines and extend to how US institutions deal with the MENA region.

Winegar’s current book project, Counter-Revolutionary Aesthetics: How Egypt’s Uprising Faltered, examines how aesthetic forms, judgments, and practices play a central role in both delegitimizing revolutionary actions and in producing everyday right-wing attachments. It is based on ethnographic research carried out in Egypt before and after the 2011 uprising. This research and writing are supported by Fulbright, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Howard Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. You can contact Jessica at: j-winegar@northwestern.edu

staff

The Middle East and North African Studies Program is supported by the staff of the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies (WCCIAS)

Bianca R. Jimenez
Associate Director, WCCIAS

Bianca has been at the University since 2006 working with various area studies programs including Asian Studies, International Studies, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and Middle East & North African Studies. She received her M.A. in Social Sciences with a concentration in Anthropology, from the University of Chicago. As Associate Director she oversees the administration of the center's programs and works with the faculty Directors to advise students, manage curricular development, and provide program management. Prior to joining Northwestern she worked for the Environmental and Conservation Program at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago where she worked closely with a local NGO in Peru, CIMA-Cordillera Azul to protect cultural diversity and land security, and to integrate improved quality of life into the management of Cordillera Azul National Park. While at the Museum, she also worked with the interactive program expeditions@fieldmuseum™, which followed Field Museum scientists as they conduct groundbreaking scientific research around the world and communicate it to a wider audience through dispatches, interactives and photos.

Contact Bianca for research workshops, event planning and information, graduate student cluster, visiting scholars, course guides.

Margaret Sagan
Program Coordinator, WCCIAS

Margaret Sagan is Program Coordinator of the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies, handling the center’s events. She joined the center in 2022. She co-authored the report “Responsible Coffee Sourcing: Towards a Living Income for Producers” in 2021, for the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI). She received her Master of International Affairs degree at Columbia University SIPA, performing field work in Malawi for the Business and Human Rights Clinic. She worked for a decade at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, where she managed visitor services, planned events including Jazz Showcase concerts and film screenings, and wrote the Close-Ups section of the Native Networks website.

Contact Margaret for information about event programming, communications, and honoraria.

Tiffany Williams-Cobleigh
Undergraduate and Graduate Coordinator, WCCIAS

Tiffany is a Program Assistant for the Center for International and Area Studies. She supports the International Studies Program, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and Middle East and North African Studies Program. She has been at Northwestern since 2016 and was with the Program of African Studies before joining WCCIAS. She earned her M.A. in Sociology with a concentration in rural community and economic development from Western Illinois University through their graduate program for returned Peace Corps volunteers and worked with the University of Missouri Extension before coming to Northwestern. She did her Peace Corps service in Rwanda and continues to travel internationally each year.

Contact Tiffany for questions regarding CAESAR, course information, registration inquiries, permission numbers, graduate summer grants, special payments, student group co-sponsorships, undergraduate prizes.