Q&A: Northwestern’s new global affairs chair says her department is all about connection

ChicagoGlobal: In five years from now, how would you like to see the Buffett Institute change? 

Deborah Cohen: The Buffett has two important functions. One of them is internal within the university, which is, it’s connective. It brings together [people] all the way from the engineers to the medical school, with obviously a heavy concentration on area studies and social sciences. So I think, as much as we can ignite those kinds of research collaborations and teaching partnerships, that is the way forward. Buffett is already doing some of that, and the aim is to do as much as we can. 

The second piece is: What impact does the research that's being done at Northwestern by our students and our faculty actually have in the wider world more generally? And so I think what I would like to see in five years hence is a really evident impact. 

I [also] want to see a comprehensive program for undergraduates. That really starts from the moment that they walk through the arches at Northwestern and ends with post-baccalaureate fellowships. For newly graduated students, we’re working on programs that will allow them to go to have an international internship for a year after graduation.

ChicagoGlobal: You used to chair Northwestern's history department. How do you think history and global affairs are connected — both academically and in the world at large?

Cohen: I would say really intimately. History is all about the range of possibilities. [And the] thing about a place like the Buffett — and this is the really exciting thing about the global affairs remit more broadly — is just the huge variety of things you can do. So we have started to do these symposia. Our first one was about access to abortion, in the fall; the winter one's about AI in geopolitics; and the spring one is about international diplomacy and, more broadly, the process of peacemaking. Each of those have their full historical and political science and anthropological and sociological [contexts]. So I think the historian often comes with the opportunity to be in these conversations with a really catholic sense of everything you can do and all the different parts of the world as well.

ChicagoGlobal: Ahead of the 2026 move to the Jacobs Center, the Buffett Institute recently moved into a new dedicated building that your department describes as "a hub for the globally focused." Why do you think it's important for people with an interest in global affairs to have a physical gathering space?

Cohen: I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. We just moved from a building that’s kind of slightly off campus to a temporary building which is right opposite dorms and residential colleges. People are like, “Why does it matter to move? Why take that extra step?” No one wants to move twice, but the virtue of this building is it’s this amazing gathering space. It’s kind of charmed — all the discussions that happen in the room are really interesting. You come in and this space matters enormously. You know, you want people to come have a coffee there, sit and be there all day, be able to read. There are very few places for students, especially with the library closed, where they like to hang out. This is a really atmospheric place. 

So we want to create the same thing in the Jacobs building, where there are students hanging out, coming to hear a talk; [where] faculty who come by feel like they can have a chat, get a coffee, read a paper. I think the Jacobs building will have a thousand people in it once it is fully renovated and all the departments that are supposed to move there move there. That will include pretty much all the social science departments other than economics and history. We know that that kind of proximity, especially if you create inviting places where people actually want to come and hang out, makes possible conversations and people running into each other. Since our entire point is connective, it's all about [how, for example,] that engineer meets that sociologist and they talk about distributed Internet networks and future-proofing, and then they have a project that really matters. 

ChicagoGlobal: What do you think makes the Midwest, and Chicagoland more specifically, stand out when it comes to being this global affairs gathering place? 

Cohen: The great thing is that it has been, for such a long time — since the 1920s. And that partly reflected Chicago's status as one of the great 19th century cities of the world. I think Chicago in particular had a sense of its world, historical, and global significance.  

I wrote a book about a group of Midwestern reporters, mostly Midwestern international foreign correspondents, who go out to see the world. We have tended to think about the Midwest as a kind of heartland of isolationism. But if you look at the kinds of readerships that the Chicago Daily News or the Tribune had for their international reporting, it's pretty awe-inspiring. The sense was that it was just as important for the pork packer in Chicago to understand what was going on, say, in global markets or global political contexts, as it was for the Wall Street banker. 

Chicago's also a city that has you encounter more people from more areas of the world on a daily basis. New York is a hierarchical city; Chicago is — quite literally in so many ways — a very flat city. That's long been true, and so may it continue.