Mangaluru: A Jesuit priest from Karnataka, southern India, has been named to head a chair in a prestigious university in the United States.
Fr Richard Rego will head the LeRoux Chair at Seattle University, Washington.
Fr Rego joined the Seattle University’s film studies department as professor of international cinema in the first week of January. He continue to teach untilthe end of March.
Dr Rego teaches a five-credit course in Indian cinema as part of the University’s international cinema program. It includes Visions of Progress in Indian Cinema, charting the trajectory of progress in a variety of Indian language cinemas, and not just the Bollywood.
For the Jesuit priest, Indian cinema is not just the Bollywood. He is convinced that Bollywood makes up for approximately 15 percent of Indian cinema. Most contribution to Indian cinema comes from the four southern Indian languages, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. In addition, Marathi and Bengali cinemas also contribute handsomely to Indian cinema.
Fr Rego says the Mumbai-based Bollywood is an insult to India’s creativity since the very name Bollywood is a copy of Hollywood.
The Jesuit scholar was scheduled to deliver the LeRoux Endowment Public Lecture on “Deconstructing Media-tion, Interrogating Modi-fication: Politics of Imaging Public Personalities” on March 2.
The chair is named after Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux a French journalist and author of detective fiction. He died in 1927 aged 59.
In the English-speaking world, he is best known for the novel The Phantom of the Opera, which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name. His novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room is also one of the most famous locked-room mysteries ever.
Fr Rego also currently teaches in the department of communication at St Joseph’s College Autonomous, Bengaluru, capital of the southern Indian state of Karnataka.
The priest is known as a Konkani writer and media critic. He has taught journalism and mass communication at St Aloysius College (Autonomous), Mangaluru, where he founded the post graduate department of mass communication.
He also established the campus-based community radio Sarang 107.8FM, which he ran 24×7, making it the only 24-hour community radio in the country. Radio Sarang 107.8FM also won two national awards, instituted by the ministry of information and broadcasting, for popularizing local culture.
After 12 years of teaching at St Aloysius College, Fr Richie, as he is known, studied further and researched at the University of Warwick (2012-13), UK, and was Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford (2013-14). Upon his return to India, he joined St Joseph’s College, Bengaluru and headed the department of communication. He also launched two novel UGC-sponsored bachelor of vocation (B Voc) courses in film production and animation.
Fr Rego has double masters in communication as well as in film and television studies, besides a doctorate in Kannada films from Pune University. He has cleared National Eligibility Test conducted by UGC. In 2007-2008, he completed a major research project for the government of Karnataka through Konkani Sahitya Academy, and in 2006-2009, completed a major research project funded by UGC.
He has published widely in his mother tongue Konkani, Kannada, and English and in international journals.