Prof. Frank Korom

Professor of Religion and Anthropology

Boston University USA

Frank J. Korom is Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Boston University. He received degrees in Religious Studies and Anthropology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1984, before pursuing advanced studies in India and Pakistan, where he earned certificates of recognition in a number of modern South Asian languages. His doctoral dissertation was on Dharmaraj, a local village deity worshipped in West Bengal from medieval times. For this, the University of Pennsylvania, awarded him a Ph.D. in 1992. 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.

Prof. Sasanka Perera

Professor of Sociology

South Asian University, New Delhi

Sasanka Perera teaches sociology at South Asian University, and is a founding faculty member of the university’s Department of Sociology. He has been the Chairman of the Department of Sociology (2011-2014), the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences (2011-2018) and the University’s Vice President (2016-2019). Prior to that, he was with the Department of Sociology at University of Colombo, Sri Lanka for twenty years. He was also the Founding Chairman of the Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture (2003-2010). He is the Editor of Society and Culture in South Asia (the journal of Department of Sociology, South Asian University, co-published with Sage India). Having been trained as a cultural anthropologist, in his teaching career, he has straddled the subject areas that are considered both Sociology and Anthropology in the general parlance, despite the debates that surround these nomenclature and disciplinary divides. In that sense, he has been able to cross boundaries and draw from developments in these disciplines quite liberally in both his own intellectual pursuits and in his endeavours to teach and guide students.His research interests have enabled him to work in Sri Lanka, USA, Cambodia, Pakistan, Nepal, Japan and India. He has written extensively and published in Sri Lanka, India and internationally in the English and Sinhala languages. An interest in photography, poetry, blogging, art, music and journalism has kept him in touch with both his own creative drives as well as the changing world of thought and expression.

Dr Adrian Mcniel

Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology

Monash University, Australia

Adrian is an ethnomusicologist specialising in Hindustani music as a scholar and as a performer on the sarod, (a twenty five stringed plucked lute). Alongside this he has wide ranging interests and journal publications in improvisation, the political economy of music, cultural history, aesthetics and the globalisation of music. His research on the political and cultural history of Hindustani music, and his book on the sarod tradition is well known in the field.

Over his career, he has spent a number of years living in India as an ARC post doctoral fellow, located at Jadavpur University, and as a visiting fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. More recently he worked as a lecturer and research guide at Macquarie University where he has extensive experience in setting up an improvisation program and supervising, developing, and teaching a large cohort of post graduate research and course work students in ethnomusicology and improvisation. Adrian also has undergone extensive training in Hindustani music and has years of international performance experience along with commercial recordings on the sarod, both in traditional and in intercultural ensembles