Speakers and Performers

Suketu Mehta

Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto, and Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Time, and Newsweek, and has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air and All Things Considered.

Mehta is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. He was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Lynnette Arnold

Lynnette Arnold is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UMass Amherst. As a linguistic anthropologist, her research examines the power of language in contexts of mobility and migration in the Americas. Her current research investigates how communication participates in care, and she is writing a book that explores how transnational Salvadoran families use everyday conversations to facilitate, enact, and signify cross-border care. Recent publications in this project have appeared in American Anthropologist and Medical Anthropology. With her research and teaching, Arnold aims to advance social justice through a deeper understanding of language. She has worked to develop community engaged pedagogy and practice in linguistic anthropology through ongoing participation with the Language and Social Justice Committee of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, an approach that is synthesized in her 2019 article Accompanying as Accomplices.

Tania DoCarmo

Tania DoCarmo is a Lectuer of Legal Studies at UMass Amherst. Her research centers on the intersections of law, society and culture, with an emphasis on migration. She is interested in how social problems come to be socially constructed, how these constructions find their way into social and legal institutions, and their consequences in practice, particularly for women, migrants and disadvantaged populations. Her current book project examines the rise of international counter-human trafficking policy at the United Nations, and the impact counter-trafficking policies for those who “translate” the law into practice and trafficked persons themselves, specifically in Cambodia and the U.S.

Her other research includes an ongoing study among detained asylum seekers in U.S. detention centers, a collaborative study about the use of storytelling by international social movement participants, and a collaborative project on “the law in computation;” that is, how legal terrain is being shaped and created through new and emerging technologies.

Prior to her academic career, she worked over ten years for international advocacy and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) in Brazil, Cambodia, and the United States. This work focused on human trafficking, migration, labor exploitation, and child protection.

Ina Ganguli

Ina Ganguli is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Associate Director of the UMass Computational Social Science Institute. Her research areas are labor economics, the economics of science and innovation, international development and economic history. Ganguli is an Affiliated Researcher at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) at the Stockholm School of Economics and the Laboratory for Innovation Science (LISH) at Harvard University. In 2018, she received the Russian National Prize in Applied Economics, awarded biennially to recognize published research on the Russian economy.

Razvan Sibii

Razvan "Raz" Sibii is a Senior Lecturer II of Journalism at UMass Amherst. His scholarly, pedagogical and journalistic interests focus on issues of language, identity construction, immigration and mass incarceration. He has worked as a full-time print reporter in his native Romania, and is currently a columnist for the Daily Hampshire Gazette writing about the "wicked problems" of immigration and mass incarceration, and a contributor to Romania's largest daily newspaper, Libertatea, writing about all things American.

Felipe Salles

Felipe Salles is a Professor of Jazz & African American Music Studies at UMass Amherst. A native of São Paulo, Brazil, Felipe Salles has been an active musician in the US since 1995, where he has worked and recorded with prominent jazz artists, including Randy Brecker, Paquito D’Rivera, David Liebman, Melissa Aldana, Lionel Loueke, Jerry Bergonzi, Chico Pinheiro, Magos Herrera, Sofia Rei, Yosvany Terry, Jovino Santos Neto, Oscar Stagnaro, Luciana Souza, and Bob Moses. He has toured extensively in Europe, North and South America, India and Australia, as a sideman and as a leader of his own group.

Salles is a 2018 Guggenheim Foundation Composition Fellow, a 2021 South Arts Jazz Road Creative Residency Grant Fellowship recipient, a 2015 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant winner, a 2009-2010 winner of the French American Jazz Exchange Grant, and a 2005-2006 winner of the Chamber Music America New Works: Creation and Presentation Grant Program, grants sponsored by The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. He was awarded First Place in the 2001 Concurso SGAE de Jazz "TETE MONTOLIU", 2001, with his composition The Return of The Chromo Sapiens.

His arrangements and compositions have been performed by some of the top groups in the world including The Metropole Orchestra, UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra, Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, Amazonas Band, Helsinki Philharmonic Violas, Meta4 String Quartet, Manhattan School of Music Jazz Orchestra, Manhattan School of Music Jazz Philharmonic Orchestra, New England Conservatory Jazz Orchestra, and New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble, among others.