Diana Sorensen is Dean of Arts and Humanities and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures in Harvard and also teaches Comparative Literature. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2001, she worked at Columbia and Wesleyan Universities. Sorensen earned her BA from Universidad de Buenos Aires and her PhD from Columbia University. Her area of specialization is Latin American literature in the19th and 20th centuries. Her expertise extends to cultural theory and gender theory.
Her writing deals with the relationship between culture and society in a variety of ways, including how an individual reader engages with a text; how social groups have defined themselves as they debate the meanings of a classic; and how to understand the ways in which cultures are “made” in the interface between material (social, economic, political) and symbolic processes.
Among her varied writings on Latin American literature are The Reader and the Text: Interpretative Strategies for Latin American Literatures; Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture (winner of the MLA Prize for the best book in the field in 1996); and Sarmiento: Annotated Edition of his Works. She was awarded a 2008 Cabot Fellowship for A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Cultural Scenes from the Latin American Sixties, published in 2007.
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Asok Kumar Das was Director, Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum, Jaipur, from1972 to 1988 and Senior Visiting Scholar, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, from1991to 1993. He was Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow between1993 and 1995 and was appointed to the Satyajit Ray Chair, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, in1996-97. |
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Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Boston University, Frank J. Korom received degrees in Religious Studies and Anthropology from the University of Colorado in 1984, before pursuing studies in India and Pakistan, where he earned certificates of recognition in a number of modern South Asian languages. He did his graduate work in folklore and folk life at the University of Pennsylvania, and was awarded the Ph.D. in 1992 for a dissertation on Dharmaraj, a local village deity worshipped in West Bengal from medieval times to the present. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, a Ford Foundation cultural consultant in India and Bangladesh, and curator of Asian and Middle Eastern collections at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe prior to his arrival at Boston University in 1998. Author and editor of eight books, his most recent publications are South Asian Folklore (2006) and A Village of Painters (2006). An earlier book, Hosay Trinidad, won the Premio Pitre international book award in 2002. |
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Partha MITTER, Hon. D.Lit. (Courtauld Institute, London University) is Emeritus Professor, Art History, University of Sussex, Member, Wolfson College, Oxford, and Honorary Fellow, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. His previous positions and honours include Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge; Radhakrishnan Lecturer, All Souls College, Oxford; Mellon Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Member, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California; Fellow, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Senior Fellow, CASVA, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.; Member of the Advisory Board, Guggenheim Museum, New York (for the exhibition, The Third Mind) and Kolkata Museum of Modern Art. His publications include Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art, 1977; Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations, 1994; Indian Art, Oxford University Press Art History Series, 2002; The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde – 1922-1947, 2007. |
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Art historian, art critic and exhibition curator, Jean-François Chevrier has been a Professor of History of Contemporary Art at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris since 1988. He was the founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine Photographies (1982-85), general advisor for the Documenta X (1997). |
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Deborah Swallow, Märit Rausing Director at the Courtauld Institute of Art since 2004, gathered her museum experience first at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and then at the Victoria and Albert Museum where she was the Keeper of the Asian Department and Director of Collections. Her first degree was in English literature which she read at New Hall, University of Cambridge, but her PhD was in Social Anthropology at Darwin College, Cambridge. |
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Founding Director of the Singapore Art Museum and of the National Art Gallery, Singapore, Kwok Kian Chow is currently the Senior Advisor to the Board and CEO of the National Art Gallery, Singapore. Kwok focuses on museology, curatorial development and art world relations in his work for the Gallery. A museum and community development veteran, Kwok is also a scholar in museology, Southeast Asian and Chinese modern and contemporary art history, and has published two monographs and numerous essays on the subjects. Kwok’s current research, writing and consultation focus is on museology and art history in a transnational context, including museum developmental models, curatorship, and museum activism as a platform for cultural development, linking local cultures and heritage with transnational and ‘global’ art forms and practices. An influential voice in the art museum sector in Asia, he helped initiate the Asian Art Museum Directors’ Forum (AAMDF). As a Board Member of ICOM International Committee of Modern Art Museums and Collections, he played a key role in organising the CIMAM Annual Conference, ‘Common Grounds for Museums in Global Society’ in Shanghai in 2010. Kwok is also a co-founder of the Bali Conversations on Contemporary Art conference series. Kwok is an active member of many public art and academic boards and committees including the Asian Art Council of the Guggenheim Museum (New York), Kolkata Museum of Modern Art (India), China Art Foundation (London), Academic Committee of the Collectors of Contemporary Chinese Art Annual Conference (China), Sculpture Square, UOB Group Art Committee, Singapore Press Holdings Chinese Newspapers and the Public Art Review Panel of the Land Transport Authority, Singapore. Kwok was awarded the Public Administration Silver Medal by Singapore in 2003, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France in 2002 and Officier of the Order in 2009. |
