Goa: A Postcolonial Society between Cultures|| Goa-Bios

Participants

Rochelle Almeida, born and raised in Bombay, India, is a professor of Global Cultures (South Asian Studies) in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University where she is Chairperson of the Concentration on Identities and Representations. While posted to teach at NYU-London, she was appointed as Senior Associate Member at St. Anthony’s College, University of Oxford, UK. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Bombay and a Doctor of Arts degree in U.S. Multi-Ethnic Literature from St. John’s University, New York. She is the author of two full-length literary critical studies entitled Originality and Imitation: Indianness in the Novels of Kamala Markandaya and The Politics of Mourning: Grief-Management in Cross-Cultural Fiction. Her next book, Britain’s Anglo-Indians: An Ethnographic Profile from Exodus to Assimilation is shortly to be published by Routledge under their Research in Race and Ethnicity Series. She has received grants from the British Council to Exeter College, Oxford, and from the National Endowment for the Humanities to Hawai’i and Paris, France. A prolific freelance writer, her journalistic and creative writing has been widely published in India and the USA.

Cristiana Bastos (CUNY 1996) is an anthropologist and a staff member of the Social Sciences Institute, Lisbon. During the spring 2013 she is the Helio and Amelia Pedrosa professor of Portuguese Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Her combined interests in anthropology, history, and science studies resulted in research on colonial and displaced identities, circulation of knowledge under empire, health care and medical institutions, having Goa as the main reference. Recent publications include articles and chapters on the medical school of Goa, the royal hospital, the African routes of Goan doctors, hegemony and subalternity, plus the volumes “Parts of Asia” (Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 17/18, 2010), “Healing Holidays” (Anthropology and Medicine 18(1), 2011), A Circulação do Conhecimento (Imp. Ciências Sociais- Online), and Clinica, Arte e Sociedade (Imp. Ciências Sociais, 2011). She is currently preparing one edited volume and a monograph on Goa.

Victor Coelho is Professor of Music at Boston University. As musicologist and performer he works primarily in the areas of 16th- and 17th-century Italian music, as well as popular music, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies, and media and technology. His books include Music and Science in the Age of Galileo (Kluwer), The Manuscript Sources of 17th-Century Italian Lute Music (Garland), Performance on Lute, Guitar, and Vihuela (Cambridge), The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, and (with Keith Polk) a history of Renaissance instrumental music, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. His recordings as lutenist and director appear on the Stradivarius and Toccata Classics labels. For more information, visit http://people.bu.edu/blues

Konrad Coutinho, TD ‚13 is a Yale College undergraduate student of Goan parents with a double major in Portuguese and Economics. He is writing a senior thesis on the Goan diaspora.

Robert Crowe, described by the New York Times as “a male soprano of staggering gifts“, is a member of perhaps the world’s smallest vocal category. His education was completed at the Manhattan School of Music, after receiving a MM from Boston University School for the Arts. In 1995 he was only the second countertenor(and first male soprano) to be a National Winner of the Metropolitan Opera Competition—having his professional debut as „Cherubino“ at the Des Moines Metro Opera in summer of that year. Mr. Crowe has sung on many opera stages in the US and in Europe. He is also an active concert singer, having performed in scores of performances of Handel’s Messiah, both as alto and soprano soloist, and Bach’s b-minor Mass, recently as 1st and 2nd soprano soloist, as well as many other oratorii from the baroque period to the modern.

Ashley D’Mello, born in Mumbai, India and raised in Calcutta and New Delhi. Is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley doing research on Urban Development issues. Has been a journalist in Mumbai since 1982 and has worked for 25 years with the Times of India, one of the largest circulated English dailies on the globe. He has also written for the Indian Express and the Free Press Journal and worked with a national news agency, the United News Of India. He studied English and History at St Stephen’s College, New Delhi, did his masters in history at the University of Mumbai anda diploma in journalism from the Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai. During his career he has covered a wide variety of issues and subjects including politics, crime, civic issues, environment, infrastructure, business and communities. He has written for Time Magazine from India and received a fellowship from Wolfson College, Cambridge. One of the highlights of his career was covering Goa as a state for the Times of India for four years. During this period he wrote about politics in the state, environment problems, the challenges thrown up by Tourism and social issues.

Dr. Antonio Gomes, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Electrophysiology and Cardiovasular Consulative Services at the Zena and Michael A. Wiener Cardiovascular Institute, The Mount Sinai Medical Center, is also a published poet and a novelist. He has published a collection of poems in Visions from Grymes Hill (1994, Turn of River Press, CT, USA). His first novel, The Sting of Peppercorns, was published by GOA 1556 and Broadway Book Center in 2010.

Jonathan Graham is a third year graduate student in the department of history at Yale. Trained as a colonial Latin Americanist, his dissertation focuses on a region of the Mexico known as the Valle del Mezquital, located just north of Mexico City, and its inhabitants, the Otomí indigenous group, over the longue durée. Along with an interest in environmental history and ethnomusicology in Latin America, Jonathan is also interested in the expansion of myths that were used to legitimate both Spanish and Portuguese empires, and how these articulated with the traditions of native peoples. The paper to be
presented is part of a larger project on the evolution of the Thomas myth in the Iberian empires.

Kenneth David Jackson is professor or Portuguese at Yale University, specializing in Portuguese and Brazilian literatures, modernist movements in literature and other arts, Portuguese literature and culture in Asia, poetry, music, and ethnography. He conducted research in India under the American Institute of Indian Studies in 1982, 1987 and 1994 and is author of Sing Without Shame (1990), a study of Creole folk verse, three CDs of field recordings in the series The Journey of Sounds (Lisbon, 1998), Builders of the Oceans (Lisbon, 1998), De Chaul a Batticaloa: As Marcas do Império Marítimo Português na Índia e no Sri Lanka (Ericeira, 2005) and A Hidden Presence: 500 Years of Portuguese Culture in India and Sri Lanka (Macau, CCPD, 1995). In Goa, he was a researcher at the Xavier Centre for Historical Research and published in the Bulletin of the Instituto Menezes Braganza.

Margaret Mascarenhas, born in Ann Arbor, raised in Caracas, with ancestral roots in Goa, is a novelist, poet, op ed columnist, creative writing instructor, editor, independent curator, perennial student of the relationships between image and text, and founding director of the Blue Shores Silent Prison Art Project designed for lifers in Goa, India. She is the author of the diasporic novel, Skin (Penguin India) in which she adopts the role of fictional memoirist, creating a post-colonial portrait of displacement and the resultant identity crisis that carries forward for generations. Her most recent novel, The Disappearance of Irene dos Santos (Grand Central, Hachette, winner of a Publishers Lunch Deluxe Award), set in Venezuela, is designed to turn magical realism on its head. Triage, a collection of poetry, flash memoir and sketches (Harper Collins) will be out in September 2013.

Bob Newman, from Marblehead, Mass., BA in Asian Studies from Cornell University (1964), served in Lucknow, India in the Peace Corps and returned to Cornell for his Ph.D. in Anthropology and Organizational Behavior. His doctoral thesis was on cultural environment and organizational effectiveness in three different types of primary school in Lucknow District and was published as “Grassroots Education in India: A Challenge for Policy Makers”. After short stints at the University of Chicago and SUNY Cortland, Bob took up a position at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia and taught there for 16 years on Anthropology and India. He started doing anthropological research in Goa in 1978 and ultimately wrote the first work of modern anthropology on that state, Of Umbrellas, Goddesses and Dreams, published in 2000. He has been involved with Goa for the last 34 years. He currently lives in his hometown, Marblehead.

Neeta Omprakash is a free lance art critic and curator based in Goa, India. She is the recipient of Nehru-Fulbright Senior Research fellowship at ECSU for the year 2012-13. She has written exhibition catalogues and articles for the art journals, papers and magazines. She has done educational programs on art for a TV Channel in Goa. She has been invited at few universities for lectures on traditional & Modern Indian. The focus of her research is the re-contextualization of myths in visual arts of Indian and transnational artists in US. Recently she has curated an art exhibition “From motherhood to Mother Goddess: Transcendence from Self to Absolute” at AKUS gallery, Eastern Connecticut State University campus, Willimantic CT.

André de Quadros is a professor of music at Boston University, where he also holds faculty positions in African, Asian, and Muslim studies and in prison education. He has performed and undertaken research in more than forty countries and is editor of the Cambridge Companion to Choral Music.

Gita Rajan, Ph.D., is professor of English and Senior Research Fellow, Center for Faith & Public Life at Fairfield University. She is coeditor of New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the US (Stanford, 2006) and of the project “Impact India 2021: Elevating the Value of Women and Girls in Society,” focusing on gender dynamics and family pressures in India. Her articles on South Asian literature treat comparative ethnicity, métissage, gender and aesthetics.

Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, native of Goa, grew up trilingual, counting Konkani, Portuguese, and English as his three mother tongues. Now a long-time resident and citizen of the U.S., he wrote Tivolem (Milkweed, 1998), his novel of village life in rural Goa, at the age of 72. Set in 1933, during the Portuguese colonial period, it is a vivid novel full of local color and humor, portraying a place seemingly isolated from the outside world. However, Tivolem faces social change and turmoil when three men and a woman return, with more cosmopolitan dispositions, after spending long years overseas. Rangel-Ribeiro is also author of Loving Ayesha and Other Stories (Harpercollins India, 2003), and Baroque Music: A Practical Guide for the Performer (Schirmer Books, 1981). He has taught himself to speak and write in several languages, and claims he can make himself easily misunderstood in all of them. Rangel-Ribeiro covered classical concerts for the New York Times in the late 1950s. In the 1970s he was appointed music director of New York’s Beethoven Society, leading it to full membership in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He is an avid collector of Goan folk songs and has arranged many of them for string ensemble or string quartet, as well as for chamber orchestra.

Filipa Lowndes Vicente, a historian, is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the University of Lisbon. Her Ph.D. in 2000 at the University of London (Goldsmiths College) was the origin for the book Travels and Exhibitions: D. Pedro V in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Lisbon: Gótica, 2003), awarded the “Victor de Sá” prize in contemporary history (2004). With the support of Fundação Oriente, she started working on Colonial India in the 19th and 20th century. She was a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of the History of Art of the Faculdade de Letras (University of Lisbon) and at the Department of Art and Archaeology of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS-University of London). Her Post-doctoral research resulted in Other Orientalisms: India between Florence and Bombay (1860-1900) (Lisbon: ICS, 2009), also published in India (Orient BlackSwan) and Italy (Florence University Press), in 2012. Another of her research interests, women artists and feminist art historical approaches, resulted in A Arte sem Histó