Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François 

Bruno Jean-François is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies, and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is the author of Poétiques de la violence et récits francophones contemporains (Poetics of Violence and Contemporary Francophone Narrative, 2017). He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals such as the PMLA, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, Nouvelles études francophones, and Lettres romanes. He has recently co-edited a special issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, titled “Mapping Francophone Postcolonial Theory.” Jean-François is currently working on a second monograph, titled Indian Ocean Creolization: Empires and Insular Cultures. It focuses primarily on the contemporary literatures and expressive cultures from the Mascarene Archipelago.

Neelima Jeychandran

Neelima Jeychandran is an Assistant Teaching Professor of African Studies and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is an Indian Ocean Studies scholar who examines memoryscapes, sacred geographies, material cultures, performances, and invisible and affective histories to study Afro-Asian intimacies and exchanges in the Global South. She has done extensive fieldwork in western India and West and East Africa and has written articles on transoceanic consciousness and African historical landscapes in Kerala and Gujarat. She is the coordinator of the research group on Indian Ocean Epistemologies, an initiative that received seed funding from the Humanities Institute to expand Indian Ocean studies at Penn State. Jeychandran is the co-editor of the book “Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds” and the co-editor of the Routledge book series “Indian Ocean and Trans-Asia,” and the special issue on “Indian Ocean Studies, African-Asian Affinities” in Verge: Studies in Global Asia journal.

Pedro Machado

Pedro Machado is a global and Indian Ocean historian with interests in commodity histories, labour and migratory movements, and the social, cultural, environmental and commercial trajectories of objects. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of history at Indiana University, Bloomington, and is the author of several works, among which are Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and Pearls, People and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds (Ohio University Press, 2020). He is currently at work on a global history of pearl shell collection and exchange while also developing research on eucalyptus and colonial forestry in the Portuguese empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

 

Smriti Srinivas

Smriti Srinivas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests include include religious imaginations and practices, cities and urban cultures, cultures of the body, and “South Asia” within comparative/transcultural worlds. Apart from articles and edited journal symposia, her books include A Place for Utopia: Urban Designs from South Asia (2015); In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body City and Memory in a Global Religious Movement (2008); Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High-Tech City (2001); and The Mouths of People, Voice of God: Buddhists and Muslims in a Frontier Community of Ladakh (1998). She is also coeditor of Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (2020). She has received numerous grants for her research from institutions such as the Mellon foundation, the Rockefeller foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of California Humanities Network, the American Academy of Religion, the Atlanta History Center, India Foundation for the Arts and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. She is editor for the Routledge Series on the Indian Ocean and Trans-Asia and currently serves on the editorial board of Contemporary South Asia and advisory board for the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.