The Trinidad and Tobago Carnival is an annual event held on the Monday and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday in Trinidad and Tobago. This event is well known for participants' colorful costumes and exuberant celebrations. There are numerous cultural events such as "band launch" fetes running in the lead up to the street parade on Carnival Monday and Tuesday. Traditionally, the festival is associated with calypso music, developed by enslaved West and Central Africans in 17th century Trinidad; however, Soca music has begun to replace calypso as the more popular musical genre for Carnival. Costume, stick-fighting, limbo, and steelpan competitions are important components of the festival.
Dougla people are Caribbean people who are of mixed African and Indian descent. The word Dougla is used throughout the Dutch and English-speaking Caribbean. Afro-Indo people may also be another term used to describe them.
David Israel Kertzer is an American anthropologist, historian, and academic, specializing in the political, demographic, and religious history of Italy. He is the Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University. His book The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (2014) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. From July 1, 2006, to June 30, 2011, Kertzer served as Provost at Brown.
Lyle Richard Campbell is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo is a Trinidad and Tobago-born British writer, and a member of the extended Capildeo family that has produced notable Trinidadian politicians and writers.
Roy Richard Grinker is an American author and professor of anthropology, international affairs, and human sciences at The George Washington University.
Nicholas B. Dirks is an American academic and a former Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. Dirks is the author of numerous books on South Asian history and culture, primarily concerned with the impact of British colonial rule. In June 2020, Dirks was named president and CEO of The New York Academy of Sciences.
John (Jack) Willis Traphagan is professor emeritus of Human Dimensions of Organizations and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has held positions as a Visiting Scholar in the Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State University, Visiting professor at the Center for International Education at Waseda University, Clark University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Traphagan's research has largely focused on rural Japan, with most of his research conducted in Iwate Prefecture. He has published extensively on science and culture, aging, health, and life in rural Japan. In the late 2000s, he developed a second stream of research focused on the culture and ethics of space exploration. He has made significant contributions in the study of risk associated with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Aziz Suryal Atiya was an Egyptian Coptologist who was a Coptic historian and scholar and an expert in Islamic and Crusades studies.
David Arnold Odden is professor emeritus of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. His contributions to linguistics have been in the area of phonology and language description, most notably African tone and the description of Bantu languages. In addition, his work on the obligatory contour principle (OCP) has been instrumental to an understanding of that phenomenon. He is the former editor of Studies in African Linguistics and a current editorial board member of Natural Language and Linguistic Theories.
Lance Banning was an American historian who specialized in studying the politics of the United States' Founding Fathers. He taught mostly at the University of Kentucky.
Raymond R. Ramcharitar is a Trinidadian poet, playwright, fiction writer, historian and media and cultural critic.
Susan Rose-Ackerman is Henry R. Luce Professor Emeritus of Law and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale University. She is an expert in political corruption and development, administrative law, law and regulatory policy, the nonprofit sector, and federalism.
Selwyn Cudjoe is a Trinidadian academic, scholar, historian, essayist and editor who is Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. He was also the Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literature and the Marion Butler McClean Professor in the History of Ideas at Wellesley. Cudjoe's particular expertise is Caribbean literature and Caribbean intellectual history, and he teaches courses on the African-American literary tradition, African literature, black women writers, and Caribbean literature.
Susan Carol Stokes is an American political scientist and the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science department of the University of Chicago, and the faculty director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. Her academic focus is on Latin American politics, comparative politics, and how democracies function in developing countries. Stokes is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Heather J. Sharkey is an American historian of the Middle East and Africa, and of the modern Christian and Islamic worlds. Her books and articles have covered topics relating to nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, postcolonial studies, missionary movements, religious communities, and language politics, especially in Egypt and Sudan. She is currently Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.
Mark S. Cladis is an author and the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown University. Since arriving at Brown in 2004, he served as Chair for several 3-year terms. His teaching and scholarship are located at the various intersections of religious studies, philosophy, and environmental humanities. He has published five books. His current book project is Radical Romanticism, Democracy, and the Environmental Imagination. He has also published over sixty articles, essays, and chapters in edited books.
Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, the ninth chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston, is a scholar best known for his research on immigration, education and globalization. He is the first Latino to lead a campus in the Massachusetts public university system. Prior to his return to the Commonwealth, Dr. Suárez-Orozco served as the inaugural UCLA Wasserman Dean at UCLA School of Education and Information Studies.
Charlotte Davis Furth was an American scholar of Chinese history. She was a professor at California State University, Long Beach, and at the University of Southern California. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright fellowship for her research, and published several books.
Susan Brownell is a Curator's Distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is known for her work on sport in China, the Olympic Games, World's Fairs, and the anthropology of the body and gender.
