Bernardo is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in his second year at ARI. His work is affiliated with the Asian Migration and the Religion & Globalisation research clusters.

He obtained a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Cornell University in 2013 and a MA in International Affairs from the New School for Social Research in 2006. Before coming to ARI he was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University.

His ethnographic work with Sri Lankan Catholic migrants has been published in Ethnography (2016), Contemporary South Asia (2014), Ethnology (2012) and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2015).

His work focuses on the culture and history of Catholic Sri Lanka and, more broadly, on the Anthropology of Christianity in the context of South Asia. Since 2008, he has worked with fishermen and migrant workers along the western coast of the island. He is currently working on a new research project that focuses on the formation of Catholic priests in Sri Lanka and Singapore.

 

My ongoing project is titled “Religious Elites & Mobility: Catholic Priestly Formation in South and Southeast Asia.” The project is an exploration of religious networks in Asia focused on the education of Catholic priests in Singapore and Sri Lanka. Its main objective is to examine the circulation of religious specialists, educators and students who come to these centres of religious learning to train or be trained in the theological, doctrinal, ritual and pastoral aspects of the priesthood. The project emphasises how technologies of mobility and networks that enable circulation have contributed to the historic consolidation of Catholic communities across the region, and are currently shaping the future of the Church in Asia.