Katherine Butler Schofield is a cultural historian and ethnomusicologist whose work focuses on South Asia. She trained as a viola player before embarking on postgraduate studies at SOAS in North Indian music, followed by a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a lectureship at Leeds. Katherine’s research interests lie generally in the areas of South Asian music, the history of Mughal India (1526-1858), music and Islam, and music and empire. They include the intersection of music with gender, friendship, love and ethics; the history of pleasure; colonial transitions; connoisseurship; social liminality; the history of North Indian musicians, dancers and actors; and Indo-Persian musical knowledge. Most recently, Katherine has been awarded €1.18M by the European Research Council to lead an exciting new major research project, ‘Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean’ (2011-14), which aims to produce a history of transitions from pre-colonial to colonial musical fields in India and the Malay peninsula c.1750-1900. Katherine’s work on ‘Musical Transitions’ has been a major inspiration for Modern Moves!

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/music/people/acad/butlerschofield/index.aspx

Frederick Moehn is Lecturer at the Music Department of King’s College, London. He earned his BA at Berklee College of Music, and his MA and PhD in Music at New York University. He has taught at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and, at New York, Stony Brook University, Columbia University, and New York University. Working with the Luso-African world, Fred’s research has generally focused on how popular music making inflects settings marked by broad social changes and transitions. His most recent book is Contemporary Carioca: Technologies of mixing in a Brazilian music scene (Duke University Press, 2012). He has also written on jazz cultures. As a practicing musician, Fred is also an active participant in London’s rich Brazilian music scene, which includes audiences for the full range of Brazilian genres from choro to forró. As a member of the Embaúba musical ensemble (named after the tropical tree), he brings to UK and New York audiences a wide repertoire of Luso-African music from Brazil to Cape Verde in small jazz combo format.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/music/people/acad/moehn/index.aspx

Catherine Servan-Schreiber is Research Fellow at the Centre for South Asia (CNRS/EHESS), Paris, and she also teaches Bhojpuri and Avadhi languages and literature at INALCO (Paris). Starting from the study of Bhojpuri and Avadhi medieval texts, she published several books and articles on Bhojpuri oral traditions. She subsequently became interested in the Bhojpuri migration from India to Mauritius and Surinam through the process of indentured labour/ l’engagisme, which led her to study the influence of Afro-Malagasy sega music on the Bhojpuri popular musical style as it developed in the Indian Ocean diaspora; some of her conclusions can be accessed through her article on ‘Tropical Body Language’ in Samaj (2011) (on line): Indian Folk Music and ‘Tropical Body Language’: The Case of Mauritian Chutney http://samaj.revues.org/3111. She has organised the international conference on ‘The Global circulations of Jazz’ at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris) with Stéphane Dorin in June 2014. Her publications include the pioneering and comprehensive Histoire d’une musique métisse à l’île Maurice. Chutney indien et séga Bollywood (Riveneuve, 2010), and Indianité et créolité à l’île Maurice (Purusartha, Ehess, 2014). She has also created a website on Indian music in Creole lands with Nadia Guerguadj: https://sites.google.com/site/indianchutneymusic

http://samaj.revues.org/3111
http://www.lexpress.mu/article/catherine-servan-schreiber-traque-le-monde-de-litinérance
http://ceias.ehess.fr/index.php?316

Carolyn Cooper is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona in Jamaica, where she teaches Caribbean, African and African-American literature. She initiated the establishment of the University’s Reggae Studies Unit. Professor Cooper is the author of Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993), and Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (2004). Most recently, she edited the much-acclaimed Global Reggae (University of West Indies Press, 2012), a collection of the plenary lectures delivered at the ‘Global Reggae’ conference at the University of West Indies at Mona, Jamaica in 2008. A powerful speaker and public intellectual, Carolyn regularly addresses international audiences on the place of Jamaica and the Caribbean in the world. The Jamaica Gleaner listed Carolyn Cooper as 6th in their list of ‘The 10 Best-Dressed Men & Women Of 2011’, and on 6th August 2013, Jamaica’s 51st Independence Day, she was awarded the national honour of the Order of Distinction in the rank of Commander (CD) ‘for outstanding contribution to Education’.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VB6ru-CFlUM&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DVB6ru-CFlUM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Cooper
http://www.mona.uwi.edu/notices/monaconf/profiles/cooper.htm
http://www.uwipress.com/content/global-reggae

Ato Quayson is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, where he has been since August 2005. He did his BA at the University of Ghana and took his PhD from Cambridge University in 1995. He then went on to the University of Oxford as a Research Fellow, returning to Cambridge in Sept 1995 to become a Fellow at Pembroke College and a member of the Faculty of English where he eventually became a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. Professor Quayson has published widely on African literature, postcolonial studies and in literary theory. He is the founding editor of the new journal from Cambridge University Press, Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, which was launched at the MLA convention this year in Chicago. He is also the editor of the magisterial, two-volume Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge, 2012) (<www.cambridge.org/9780521517492> ; his most recent book is the Blackwell Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism Studies, co-edited with Girish Daswani (Blackwell, 2013). Imminently forthcoming is his new book, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2014), which includes a chapter on the salsa culture in this African city. He has been elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2013). Ato loves to dance, but declares himself as having hitherto lacked the discipline to master any single dance style. We hope that his association with Modern Moves may help him change that.

http://www.utoronto.ca/cdts/ato_bio.html
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Oxford-Street-Accra/?viewby=author&lastname=Quayson&firstname=Ato&middlename&sort=newest
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=PLI

Professor Achille Mbembe is a philosopher, political scientist, and public intellectual. He is currently a member of the staff at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He also has an annual visiting appointment at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. He is Editor of The Johannesburg Salon and Convenor of the Johannesburg School of Theory and Criticism. Born in Cameroon in 1957, he obtained his PhD in History at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). He was Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York, from 1988-1991, a Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., from 1991 to 1992, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1996, Executive Director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal, from 1996 to 2000. Achille was also a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001, and a visiting Professor at Yale University in 2003. He has written extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). His most recent books are On the Postcolony (published in Paris in 2000 in French; English translation published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001) and the much-awaited Critique de la raison nègre (Éditions de la Découverte, 2013).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achille_Mbembe
http://wiser.wits.ac.za/users/achille-mbembe