Professor Vanessa Botelho
Vanessa Botelho is an Associate Professor of Broadcast and Digital Journalism at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She spent nearly three decades in television news, most recently as an Executive Producer for NBC and a live newscast producer for WABC-TV. She is also a two-time Emmy Award winner for coverage of live breaking news events. She is completing a Masters Degree in Biography and Memoir at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. A previous recipient of a Leon Levy Center for Biography scholarship, she is writing a historical memoir that focuses on her family’s immigration journey from Calcutta, India to New York City in the late 1970’s. The project aims to highlight how members of the Anglo-Indian diaspora negotiated their identities after colonialism and found ways to acclimate themselves to drastically different societies.
Her father is of Portuguese descent and her mother is of British descent, which qualifies them as Anglo-Indian. For many of her family members, the complexities of being a mixed-race outsider in post-colonial India was deeply felt while living in Calcutta after the country’s independence in 1947. Vanessa was born in Calcutta. In 1978, at the age of five, she emigrated with her parents and younger sister to Brooklyn, New York. As she will argue in the book, this sense of being an outsider was transmitted over to North America and subsequently wove itself throughout her childhood growing up in the all-white, predominantly Italian-American neighborhood of Bensonhurst. One could say that they experienced a double sense of otherness, one that began in post-colonial India and subsequently, as new immigrants to the United States.
Her research interests include a larger exploration of Anglo-Indians and their place in India and the wider diaspora. Stories of social inclusivity, and lack thereof, will therefore be the focus of her research in England—the epicenter of the Anglo-Indian diaspora.
As an Anglo-Indian, she aims to combine memoir and history in order to document the experiences of her family in New York and other Anglo-Indians in the United Kingdom and wider world. It is a project that she hopes will give Anglo-Indians their rightful space in history as people who overcame major obstacles and made significant contributions to their adopted societies. Conducting research at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the British Library in London and the National Archives in Kew, Richmond is expected to provide essential support in deepening her research and understanding of how Anglo-Indian identity and memory were shaped in post-colonial India and the wider diasporic world, and how these forces shaped the story of her own family as well.
