People
Sonali Bhagchandani holds an MA in History from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research explores the intersections of narrative strategy, emotion, and memory through the material history that consolidates ‘postcolonial’ India. Sonali obtained a BA in English Literature from St. Xavier’s College in 2016 and a diploma in Modern & Contemporary Indian Art and Curatorial Studies from the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, in 2017.
Rico Franses is Chair of the Critical Analysis of Art at BICAR. He was for many years Founding Director of the University Art Galleries and Collections at the American University of Beirut. He has also held teaching positions at The Australian National University (Canberra), Pratt Institute (New York), and a fellowship at Harvard University. He has a BA in Philosophy (McGill University, Montreal), an MA in Art History (McGill) and a PhD in Art History (Courtauld Institute of Art, London). Among his publications are a book, Donor Portraits in Byzantine Art. On the Vicissitudes of Contact between Human and Divine (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and several articles including ‘Lacan and Byzantium. In the Beginning was the Image’, ‘The Deleuzian Spatiality of Byzantine Art’, and “Untime in the Unconscious. On the Dislocations of Time in Freud, Lacan, Laurie Anderson and Walid Sadek’.
Rohit Goel is Director/Professor of the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). He is the editor of Future Perfect: Catastrophe and Redemption in the Contemporary (Kaph 2023) and the co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics (Bloomsbury 2019). Rohit has taught courses in critical theory, historiography, and politics at the University of Chicago, Sciences Po Paris, the American University of Beirut, and Jnanapravaha Mumbai. He received the Fulbright IIE and Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellowships to pursue years of Arabic language study in Syria and was awarded the Fulbright DDRA and Andrew C. Mellon Fellowship for PhD dissertation research in primary sources in Lebanon. He completed his BA from Harvard College and, as Harvard University’s Paul Williams Fellow to Emmanuel College, was granted an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge.
Rutwij Nakhwa is pursuing an MA+PhD in Philosophy at IIT Bombay. Since 2018, he has taught courses and conducted guest lectures at the Mass Media Department of St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. For years, Rutwij worked in India’s film festival circuit as a journalist and in curation, subtitling, casting, and layout design, and written on cinema for The Hindu. He holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Critical Theory, Aesthetics, and Practice from Jnanapravaha Mumbai (2018) and a Bachelor’s in Mass Media (Journalism) with Honours from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai (2017).
Pahul Singh is the Director of Design at the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). She holds a BFA in Painting from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan in 2019, and an MVA in Painting from MS University of Baroda in 2021.
