R. Benedito Ferrão

Books

 

 

Ferrão, R. Benedito, ed. Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar. Panjim: Fundação Oriente, 2017.

Ferrão, R. Benedito and Maria Vanessa de Sa. The Girl Who was the Color of Nothing: A Children’s Story for Adults. Panjim: The Uninvited, 2026.

Ferrão, R. Benedito. Across Continents: Writing Goans, Making Worlds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2026.

 

Background

R. Benedito Ferrão in an Associate Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies, with an affiliation in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Dr. Ferrão has been named University Professor for Teaching Excellence (2025-28), is the recipient of the Jinlan Liu Award for Research in APIA Studies (2024-27), and is a Coco Faculty Fellow (2026-27).

Previously, he was a Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies (2022) and a Fellow of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies (University of Bayreuth, Germany, 2020-21). Dr. Ferrão has also been the recipient of a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Research Award (2019-20). He completed his Ph.D. at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he was a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar. As an Endeavour Postdoctoral Fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, he researched literary representations of African slavery in the Indian Ocean world.

His other scholarly and teaching interests are in Afro-Asiatic connections between Portuguese and British post/colonialities, as well as diasporic and transnational fiction with a focus on race, gender, and sexuality. In addition to having taught at UCLA, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (Pilani) Goa, and Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, he was also a Mellon Faculty Fellow at William & Mary (2014-17).

Dr. Ferrão’s present research on post/colonial literary and visual cultures derives, in part, from his curatorial practice. Apart from working with or curating the art of Karishma D’Souza, Angela Ferrão, and Maria Vanessa de Sa, he organized the exhibition Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar at the Fundação Oriente gallery in Panjim, Goa. He edited a book of the same title (Fundação Oriente 2017) to accompany the 2017-18 retrospective, which was the last time Navelcar’s art was exhibited publicly during his lifetime.

Dr. Ferrão’s first monograph is Across Continents: Writing Goans, Making Worlds (University of Michigan Press 2026). He is also the author of The Girl Who was the Color of Nothing: A Children’s Story for Adults (The Uninvited 2026), illustrated by Maria Vanessa de

Sa. His scholarly writing has appeared in Research in African Literatures, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Studies in Travel Writing, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and in such edited books as Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature (MLA 2024) and Decolonial Aesthetics II: Modes of Relating (J. B. Metzler 2023). As an internationally published writer of creative fiction, non-fiction, and public commentary, his work can be read in Scroll.in, The Wire, João Roque Literary Journal, and Mizna, among other publications.