This month, Northwestern in Qatar welcomed Dr. Everette Dennis as its new dean, the second since the school’s inception in 2007.
Dennis, who had previously been chair of communication and media management at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Business and founding director of the Media Studies Center at Columbia University, said his experiences as an educator and as a scholar have contributed to his hope of bringing a focus on media convergence to NU-Q.
“My biography says I’m an educator, institution builder and media expert,” Dennis said, who started his career working for newspapers on the West Coast. “My interest really is how media and media industries evolve in our society, and I am really interested in the convergence of media and digital technology.”
Dennis, who took over for NU-Q’s first dean, John Margolis, said he hopes to bring NU-Q out of its developmental stage and create a vision for the institution.
“My job is really to take it on its next leg of its journey and trajectory to move it from a start-up institution to a mature one,” Dennis said. “The first few years have really been establishing a place, getting it organized, getting it started, and my job is to create a vision of what this school should look like five years from now, and we need to get on the ball and get into those goals.”
University Provost Daniel Linzer said Margolis’s role as dean worked to establish NU-Q as an institution and that Dennis’s will be to ensure positive progress in the school.
“John Margolis was just what we needed as the founding dean of NU-Q, in that he has deep institutional knowledge and could translate that knowledge into setting up a new school with appropriate policies and practices with the Northwestern system,” Linzer said. “Now that the foundation has been formed for NU-Q’s ongoing successful operations, we are very excited to have Ev Dennis on board as the new dean of NU-Q.”
Linzer said Dennis’s experience and passion made him a clear choice for the NU faculty for the position as NU-Q’s new dean.
“We were looking for someone with significant academic expertise in both communications and journalism, someone who had developed international programs, and someone who can interact well with the media industries,” Linzer said. “Ev Dennis does all that and more. He cares deeply about student learning and faculty scholarship, and he is an excellent manager of the business aspects of the school.”
Having worked across the globe in places like Latin America and Europe, Dennis said the students at NU-Q are receiving an opportunity to become dominant in the media industry by working in the Middle East, one of the three places, in addition to India and China, where monumental change can be witnessed.
“It’s a place on a very fast track, with wonderful resources and lots of encouragement, but Northwestern really headed into one of the most exciting, educational collaboration in the world today, ” Dennis said. “I can feel the palpable change in the air, and this is a place of great change. I’m very excited how emerging voices come out in the midst of such extraordinary change.”
