Welcome to Bridge Contributions, our new publication covering the Bridge Moris Diaspora Talent Platform. You are receiving it because you are part of the Bridge Moris community.
Hi everyone!
Thank you for following us through this series where we shared more about our Diaspora Talent Platform. Today, we’re presenting our last six Founding Diaspora Contributors. Their varied expertise reflects and builds on the island's deep foundations: water and climate, built space, heritage, and minds.
We believe that some of the most important work diaspora members can bring is often the least visible, interrogating and re-envisioning the systems, spaces and stories that society rests on. Presenting Shane, Christelle, Aqiil, Akshay, Chrisyl and Ronnie.
Founding Diaspora Contributors
Shane Ah-Siong, a Brooklyn-based architectural designer and educator trained at Florida and Harvard, works on art direction, experiential design, postcolonial urbanism and spatial justice across the Indian Ocean. His dream is to co-design a cultural institution in Mauritius: one that holds Indian Ocean histories and stays alive as a space for local communities.
Christelle Collet is a Rodriguan-born, Mauritian-Australian doctoral candidate in multidisciplinary gender studies at the University of Cambridge and a Gates Cambridge Scholar. A decolonial feminist scholar, she reads the history of Creole Mauritian women through the clothes they chose to wear, tracing dress as a language of gendered, racial and cultural resistance. She co-authored and co-edited Women in the Making of Mauritian History, and led Black Lives Matter Perth during her years in Australia. She wants to co-create knowledge with local communities, decolonise academia, and amplify the voices of women and Creole Mauritians.
Aqiil Gopee is a Mauritian PhD student in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is pursuing a historical archaeology of Islamic trade and wealth across the Indian Ocean (c. 8th–10th centuries CE). A prize-winning writer, he also co-translated the first English edition of Louis Timagène Houat’s 1844 abolitionist novel Les Marrons. He is drawn to the island’s “shadow histories” and to the long-invisibilized connections that bind it to the wider world.
Akshay Kowlesser is a hydrologist and civil engineer completing a Marie Curie fellowship PhD on urban flood forecasting, with earlier training at Japan's UNESCO centre for water hazard and risk management. He served as focal point for Mauritius' first Land Drainage Masterplan and, as a Land Drainage Officer, championed nature-based solutions for integrated flood and water management. He wants to give Mauritius better tools to live with water in a changing climate.
Chrisyl Wong-Hang-Sun is an AHRC-funded PhD researcher in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and is also a fellow of the Stuart Hall Foundation. Her fieldwork moves across Mauritius and the Outer Islands. She has a background working as a Project Curator at the British Museum and enjoys the practice of writing poetry, especially in academic spaces. Her work is published in Challenges and Prospects for the Chagos Archipelago and The Journal of Museum Ethnography. Her aim is to tell the stories of Kreol peoples across the Outer Islands of Mauritius through both an anthropological and poetic lens.
Ronnie Nagloo is a mathematician working at the frontier of differential algebra and model theory. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago, and was awarded the prestigious American Mathematical Society’s Centennial Research Fellowship in 2023-2024. Before mathematics, he was a national-level basketball player and a Mauritian league MVP. Having found his own improbable path from a small island to a US research university, he wants to make advanced study feel within reach for students from every background, through mentorship, public talks, and summer schools on the island.
Want to get involved?
Over the past few weeks, we've presented our founding bedrock of 20 Founding Diaspora Contributors who want to bring their knowledge back to Mauritius and help build the economy. These are the faces you'll see when you visit our website. We can't thank them enough for believing in us, for championing Bridge Moris, and for adding their words to our story.
Beyond these 20 visible faces lie many, many more members who are part of our Diaspora Talent Platform.
If you are interested in contributing your skills, you can view a starting catalogue of opportunities and submit your CV and/or LinkedIn profile to be considered for future opportunities on our talent platform page.
Your profile stays with the Bridge Moris team. Your submission is not published anywhere and is not browsable by the public.
