In addition to publishing written, acoustic and visual Decolonial Subversions, we aim to be a platform where like-minded people from all walks of life and subject areas can connect, forge friendships and initiate collaborations. Below is a list of the Reviewers of Decolonial Subversions, with their short bios. If you wish to get in touch with any of them, either contact them directly or, where their email is missing, contact Romina (ri5@soas.ac.uk) or Monika (mh121@soas.ac.uk) with a request to be connected.
Ibtisam Abujad
Ibtisam M. Abujad is a doctoral candidate and teacher in the department of English at Marquette University in the United States. In her research,
Ibtisam examines how oppression and resistance function culturally. She uncovers how global systems of power that are economic, social, and
political are cultivated in media, literature, film, and in everyday cultural practices through race, gender, class, and national borders and boundaries
that act as mechanisms. In similar ways, she analyzes cultural texts and their embeddedness in the conditions of their production to think about
how resistance to oppression can occur culturally and communally through ways of being, doing, and knowing that disrupt these mechanisms. To
enable this comprehensive anti-oppression decolonial framework in her “critique and praxis-oriented” research, teaching, and creative writing, she
utilizes transnational and intersectional feminism, cultural studies and historical approaches, critical race theory, theories of class and politics, and
Critical Muslim Studies. Ultimately, her work stems from her positionality as a Muslim and Palestinian woman, migrant, mother, academic, and
poet, motivating a solidarity with those most vulnerable in the world.
She has published a number of scholarly articles and creative works. To engage with her research and publications, visit
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ibtisam-Abujad/research
Shubhashree Basnyat
Shubhashree Basnyat is a graduate student at SOAS, pursuing an MA in Postcolonial Studies. She completed her undergraduate studies in the United States, from Williams College where she majored in English and received the Highest Honours award for her dissertation Living Kathmandu, which celebrates the subversive practices of indigenous communities in disrupting Kathmandu’s colonial cartography.
Born and raised in Nepal, Shubhashree is interested in the interventions South Asian literature, history and politics can make into reshaping mainstream postcolonial, queer and ecocritical studies. Shubhashree aspires to earn a PhD and continue into teaching.
In her free time, she is learning to cook, meditate, and be a good friend. Shubhashree can be reached at b.mishree@gmail.com
Ana Beatriz Braun
Ana Beatriz Braun has been teaching and developing research at the Federal University of Technology – Paraná (UTFPR), Brazil, since 2012. She has a PhD in language and literature from UTFPR (2016).
She lived in Maputo, Mozambique, from 2006 to 2010, where she studied linguistics at Eduardo Mondlane University and also worked as a teacher at the Brazil-Mozambique Cultural Center. She currently teaches English and develops research related to literature and foreign language teaching. Her email address is anabeatrizbraun@gmail.com
Cat Button
Dr Cat Button is the Director of Planning and Urban Design and Senior Lecturer (associate professor) in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, UK. Water has been Dr Button’s research focus for over a decade, particularly looking at domestic water shortages in India. She is interested in how people deal with not having enough water (and also what happens when there is too much water in the wrong place). She is increasingly drawn to why people make these decisions around water provision and use. She is a co-Investigator on two international and transdisciplinary UKRI GCRF research hubs. Her current research focusses on cultural, social and spiritual significances of water.
https://www.ncl.ac.uk/apl/people/profile/catbutton.html
Elisée Byelongo
Dr Byelongo Elisée Isheloke is a PhD holder in Management Sciences specialising in Business Administration from the Durban University of Technology. Among other things, he obtained a Master’s degree in Business Administration, and qualifications in pedagogy and language teaching. With over fourteen years’ experience as an educator, Elisée works at the University of Cape Town as a postdoctoral research fellow (Minerals to Metals Initiative) and he was recently added to the UCT linguistics group.
He used also to work as a sworn interpreter, and as a translator at the Alliance Française and the Durban Magistrate Court.
His proficiency in English, French, Swahili, Esperanto and African languages (e.g. Ebembe) gave impetus to his publishing in academic journals and other fora. He worked as a web journalist for the Mining IR team during the Mining Indaba, the outcome of which gave birth to around ten articles. Elisée has two books under his name and a variety of publications.
He now looks forward to decolonising research by all means. Elisée can be reached at: ebyelongo@gmail.com
Suresh Canagarajah
Suresh Canagarajah is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Applied Linguistics, and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He teaches courses in Global Englishes, Multilingual Academic Writing, Sociolinguistics, and Decolonization Studies. He taught earlier in the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and the City University of New York. He was formerly the editor of the TESOL Quarterly and the President of the American Association of Applied Linguistics. His Routledge Handbook on Language and Migration (Routledge, 2017) won the 2020 best book award from the American Association of Applied Linguistics. His latest publication is Language Incompetence: Learning to Communicate through Cancer, Disability, and Anomalous Embodiment (Routledge, 2022).
Sharmila Chauhan
Playwright, screenwriter and prose writer, Sharmila’s work is often a transgressive meditation on love, sex and power.
Her plays include: Be Better in Bed, The Husbands (Soho Theatre), Born Again/Purnajanam (Southwark) and 10 Women (Avignon Festival). Both of her short films (Girl Like You, Oysters) were produced by Film London and her feature Mother Land was long-listed for the Sundance Writers’ Lab.
Sharmila also has a degree in pharmacy and a PhD in clinical pharmacology. She lives in London with her husband, son and daughter, and cat Tashi.
URL: https://sharmilathewriter.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sharmilawrites
Professor Matthew Clarke
Alfred Deakin Professor Matthew Clarke is pro vice-chancellor responsible for researcher development at Deakin University, Australia. His area of research expertise is the nexus between religion and development, and humanitarian action. He has spent twenty-five years working and researching in the field of international development both in universities and non-governmental organisations. The majority of Professor Clarke’s field work occurs in the Pacific region. He has also written on aid effectiveness, emerging aid donors, children with disability in development and child sponsorship.
Professor Heather J. Coleman
Heather J. Coleman is professor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta and director of the Program on Religion and Culture at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. She has served as editor of Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes since 2011. She is the author of Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905–1929 (Indiana University Press, 2005), co-editor (with Mark D. Steinberg) of Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Indiana, 2007), and editor of Orthodox Christianity in Imperial Russia: A Source Book on Lived Religion (Indiana, 2014).
Anaïs Da Fonseca
Anaïs is currently an Associate Lecturer in the Department of the History of Art, University College London, U. K. She received her Ph.D. in History of Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 2017. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary art from South Asia, the history of craft, design, and “folk and tribal arts,” and the politics of culture and heritage in South Asia. She is also interested in the phenomenology of contemporary art making, and in the Europe-India-Africa trade and movements of skills since the 19th century. Before joining UCL, Anaïs was a Researcher in the Economic history of West Africa at London Business School (2019-2021), a Research Associate at the SOAS South Asia Institute (2018-2019) and an adjunct researcher at Tate Research Centre: Asia (2017-2018). She is currently working on her monograph on Continuity and Changes in Contemporary Cheriyal Paintings from
Telangana India.
Rutuja Deshmukh
The author is an alumnus of DMCS, Pune University (2006) and SOAS, University of London (2018) wherein she has pursued Master’s programmes in communication studies (media research) and South Asian area studies respectively. Retaining her passion for Indian cinema, she completed her Master’s dissertation on Marathi Cinema and Identity under Prof. Rachel Dwyer, which is soon to be published as a book chapter.
A freelance writer with regular contributions to leading national and international online media houses like The Wire, Countercurrents and Himal Southasian, Rutuja has also been a visiting faculty at the Department of Media Studies, Allahabad University in 2014. Her write up on the #MeToo movement has been incorporated in the book #MeToo – A Blow to Patriarchy.
She is a visiting faculty of ‘Culture and Cinema’ at Flame University, Pune. Rutuja can be reached at rutujawakankar@gmail.com
Manju Edachira
Manju Edachira presently teaches at the Centre for English Language Studies, University of Hyderabad.
She has recently submitted her PhD thesis on caste and contemporary Malayalam cinema titled Affective Archives at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad. She works on Malayalam cinema, aesthetics, archives and caste-gender problematic.
She is a former Erasmus Plus Fellow (2016) at the Film Studies Division, Freie University, Berlin. Manju can be reached at manjueeswar@gmail.com
Jonathan Galton
Jonathan Galton is an anthropologist interested in identity, belonging and how people live with different ideas and histories. He holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the Social Research Institute, University College London and is currently investigating the relationships between left-wing politics, LGBTQ+ activism and Muslim communities in the UK. He also lectures on migration and ethnographic research on the Social Science programme. His book, based on PhD research conducted in 2017, Fake Gods and False History: Being Indian in a Contested Mumbai Neighbourhood has been published by UCL Press in late 2023. He has also written for Scroll and published with South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal. In his spare time, he composes music and performs on the piano. He can be reached at j.galton@ucl.ac.uk
Monika Hirmer
Monika Hirmer is a research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS-E) ‘Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective’ at FA University in Erlangen–Nürnberg (Germany), where she researches tantra from a cross-cultural perspective. Her area of research lies at the intersection of anthropology and philosophy and spans Goddess traditions, tantric traditions, eco-cosmologies and decolonial studies, with a focus on South Asia. She obtained her PhD in Religions and Philosophies from SOAS, University of London, preceded by an MPhil in Anthropology from the University of Hyderabad, India, and an MA in South Asian Area Studies from SOAS. Monika is a certified Teaching Fellow and has taught at SOAS in the departments of Religions and Philosophies and Politics and International Studies. In 2020 she co-founded the open access, multilingual, peer reviewed publishing platform Decolonial Subversions, of which she in one of the editors.
Harsimran Kalra
Harsimran (Simran) is a lawyer turned academic concluding her doctorate in sociology of law at King’s College London. She was awarded the Dickson Poon Scholarship to conduct her research. Her work participates in the politics of democratisation of law and investigates the renegotiated meaning of law within the diaspora communities in the UK. In particular, she examines the use of law and religion in management of conjugality by British South Asian Muslims.
Between 2011-13, Simran worked in India on legislative reform, parliamentary processes, and researched and advocated for women’s rights, citizenship, and anti-corruption laws, making representations to the Parliamentary Standing Commissions, and provided research briefs to Members of Parliament. She has since pursued a Master’s in Law at SOAS, London and taught courses on Law and Development and women’s rights at Jindal Global University, Delhi.
Simran’s research interests have cohered towards the themes of gender, legal pluralism and legal consciousness studies. Her work has been published in the South Asia Review, Economic and Political Weekly and in the SOAS Law Journal.
Tung-Yi Kho
Tung-Yi is a scholar of modern China with PhDs in Social Anthropology (SOAS) and Cultural Studies (Lingnan University, HK).
His research interests cut across multiple fields but their singular concern is with the human predicament, and especially with well-being under the conditions of capitalist modernity.
He is presently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
He is a founding member of the Global University for Sustainability: https://our-global-u.org/oguorg/. Tung-Yi can be reached at kho.tungyi@yahoo.com
Dr Andrey Mikhailovich Kulikov
Andrey Kulikov was born on February 25, 1987 in Moscow. From 2009 to 2013 he studied at the Faculty of Regional Studies at the Institute of Oriental Countries (Eastern University). In 2012 he completed a language training at Peking University (北京大学). From 2013 to 2016 he undertook full-time postgraduate research at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2016 he defended his thesis on Sinology and diplomatic activities of Archimandrite Palladius (Kafarov). In 2015 he completed a language training at the Chinese University of Culture (中國 文化大學) (Taipei), and in 2018¬–2019 completed a language training at the University of Suzhou (苏州大学) (Suzhou).
Since 2012 Andrey has been teaching Chinese at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation (since 2017, he has been an associate professor). He has been teaching Chinese at the Confucius Institute at Moscow State University since 2015, and since 2016 has been a junior researcher (since 2019, a researcher) at the China Department, Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Lisa Lewis
Lisa Lewis is professor in theatre and performance, and co-director of the Centre for Media and Culture in Small Nations at the University of South Wales.
Her research has focused on colonialism and performance, and performance and postcolonial identities, which she most recently explored in a practice-research project titled Welsh and Khasi Cultural Dialogues, an interdisciplinary arts and performance project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, in collaboration with researchers and artists from India and Wales. Her research also explores the inter-relationships of performance, memory and place, especially as they relate to small nations, minority languages and stateless peoples.
Punita Lumb
Punita Lumb is passionate about critically examining higher education globally and mobilising theory to improve practical student programming.
Her PhD research focuses on theories of decolonisation and post-colonial studies in the field of education. She is currently with the Multi-faith Centre at the University of Toronto where she facilitates conversations about identity, community and spirituality from a decolonial lens that recognises multiple ways of being, becoming and knowing the world. She also supports students as they navigate religious accommodation, discrimination and conflict.
Gustav Mbeha
Gustav Mbeha is originally from Namibia but lives in Cape Town.
He did a BA Hons degree at the Polytechnic of Namibia. Currently he is a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town. He also holds an MA in Linguistics from the same university.
His area of study is sociolinguistics, with particular focus on Bantu languages. He is interested in the semantic structures of languages, noun class systems, phonetics, lexicon and the grammatical structures of Bantu languages. Gustav can be reached at MBHGUS001@myuct.ac.za
Tereza Menšíková
Tereza Menšíková is a sociologist and a PhD student in the study of religion at the Faculty of Social Studies and the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno. Her research interests include the marginalisation of minorities in the Czech Republic and in India, the mobilisation and emancipation strategies of social movements, Dalit communities, ageing and homelessness. In her dissertation and IGA research project Challenging Marginalisation Online: The Case of Dalit Movement Network Through Blog and News Platforms, she explores the social and discursive patterns of Indian Dalit online activism through activist online production on blog and news platforms. By adopting the methods of computational text analysis (unsupervised machine learning models) and social network analysis, her research aims to understand the role of religious and secular motives in the socio-political activism of marginalized communities.
Afsar Mohammad
Afsar Mohammad teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. Afsar has two book publications: The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and
Shared Devotion in South India, (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He also writes poetry and short fiction in his home language of Telugu.
William Mpofu
William J Mpofu is a senior researcher at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies in the university of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa.
His research interests are in Decoloniality, especially the Philosophy of Liberation and Critical Diversity Literacy.
Mpofu is currently doing work on Decolonising Pan-Africanism, that is to examine what a decolonised Pan-Africanism of the Twenty First Century that is alive to neocolonialism, coloniality and other dominations and exploitations might look like.
Mpofu's latest publications are: Robert Mugabe and the Will to Power in an African Postcolony (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and Decolonising the Human: Reflections from Africa on Difference and Oppression (Wits Press, 2021), with Professor Melissa Steyn: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-47879-7
and https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/46908 .
Vivek Oak
Vivek S Oak is a fellow with Handloom Futures, Hyderabad. He is interested in investigating relations between technology and society in the realm of artisanal textile production.
Ricardo Luiz Pedrosa Alves
Ricardo Luiz Pedrosa Alves is a poet, literary critic, university teacher and researcher of African literature.
With a PhD in Letters from the Universidade Federal do Paraná, he currently holds a post-doctoral internship at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, with the project Panorama dos estudos de literaturas africanas na pós-graduação brasileira. He participates in the CNPq Research Group PIEL AFRICA – Pactos e impactos do espaço nas literaturas africanas (Angola e Moçambique).
Giridhar Rao
At Azim Premji University, India, A. Giridhar Rao teaches courses on language policy, language pedagogy, linguistic human rights, Esperanto and linguistic democracy, and science fiction.
He blogs on these themes (in English) at http://bolii.blogspot.com/ and (in Esperanto) at http://www.ipernity.com/blog/giridhar/. Giridhar can be reached at rao.giridhar@apu.edu.in
Gautham Reddy
Dr. Gautham Reddy is Research Librarian for South Asian Studies and Religion at Emory University, Atlanta. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago’s Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. His thesis was titled “An Empire of Literary Telugu: Remaking Language and Community in Colonial South India.” Gautham also holds an M.A. in the History of Religion from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is a member of the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) and chair of the Committee on South Asian Languages and Documentation (CONSALD).
He serves as managing editor for the web journal, Maidaanam: Culture, History, and Politics from the Deccan and Southern India .
Sandra Sousa
Sandra Sousa holds a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian studies from Brown University. Currently, she is an associate professor in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Central Florida, where she teaches Portuguese language, Lusophone and Latin American studies.
Her research interests include colonialism and post-colonialism; Portuguese colonial literature; race relations in Mozambique; war, dictatorship and violence in contemporary Portuguese and Luso-African literature; and feminine writing in Portuguese, Brazilian and African literature.
She has articles published in the USA, Brazil and Portugal. She is the author of Ficções do Outro: Império, Raça e Subjectividade no Moçambique Colonial (Esfera do Caos, 2015) and has co-edited Visitas a João Paulo Borges Coelho: Leituras, Diálogos e Futuros (Colibri, 2017).
Peter Sutoris
Peter Sutoris is an environmental anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at the University of York.
He is the author of monographs Visions of Development (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Educating for the Anthropocene (The
MIT Press, 2022). His research focuses on imagination of alternative futures, cultured of degrowth and activist pedagogies.
Michael W. Thomas
Michael Thomas is a postdoctoral research fellow in Ethiopian Screen Worlds at SOAS, University of London on the ERC funded project African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film Studies and is the co-editor of the first volume on Ethiopian screen worlds called Cine-Ethiopia: The History and Politics of Film in the Horn of Africa (2018).
He works alongside colleagues across the world in efforts to open up film curricula to African, and specifically Ethiopian, experiences of cinema and television. His scholarship on Amharic cinema has been published as articles in academic journals and as chapters in various collected volumes. Michael also works on video-essays, documentaries and fiction films.