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Anjana Manoj Nair

Ms. Anjana Manoj Nair is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, School of Social Sciences, at the University of Hyderabad. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from the University of Delhi. Anjana’s current research focuses on transgressions and deviance, examining their codification within normative Sanskrit theological discourses and parallel contestations within narrative literary traditions across a historical continuum.

Anjana has been an ICSSR grantee under the International Collaboration Data-Collection Scheme in 2025, and a Getty grantee in 2024 for attending the 36th Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art held in Lyon. Alongside presenting her research at international academic forums such as the 28th European Conference on South Asia Studies in Heidelberg, and the 13th International Convention of Asia Scholars in Surabaya, she has also published in multiple reputed journals.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow, Anjana is conducting her research in the Department of Asian Studies, College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Her project employs an innovative methodological framework that integrates quantitative techniques for terminological frequency analysis of spatial categories with qualitative archival research, supported by digital humanities tools and a database of rare manuscript variants housed in U.S. repositories. Moving beyond prevailing notions of ‘status’, ‘dignity’, and ‘reputation’ as analytical parameters, Anjana examines social hierarchies and spatial marginalization through the conceptual lenses of ‘deviant spaces’ and ‘spatial outliers.’ In her spare time, Anjana enjoys birdwatching, wildlife safaris, trekking in the Western Ghats, and underwater diving.

Gulfishan Khan

Prof. Gulfishan Khan is a specialist in medieval Indian history. Till June 2024, she was professor and chairperson of the Department of History at Aligarh Muslim University (India). Her most recent publication is a paper Representations of the Palace and Cityscape (co-authored with W. M. Thackston) in the annual Muqarnas (Brill: 2024). Her major academic contributions are the two books Indian Muslim Perceptions (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Indo-Persian Elite (New Delhi: Manohar, 2025).

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Prof. Gulfishan Khan would be studying some important aspects of architectural refashioning of the dynamic capital (darul khilafa) Agra, a vibrant medieval urban settlement during the first half of the Seventeenth Century. In this significant period the Mughal court at Agra was the nucleus of a splendid flowering of art and artistic culture, based on blending of Indian and Perso-Islamic traditions under the liberal court-patronage of emperor Shah Jahan. The architectural contribution of imperial women in the aestheticization of the urban landscape of the historic capital and its environs would be highlighted.

Shaifali Arora

Dr. Shaifali Arora is a scholar of colonial and postcolonial South Asian history, with a particular interest in the cultural and linguistic history of the 1947 Partition of India. Her research examines how histories of displacement are remembered, reworked, and transmitted through everyday practices, with a particular focus on Punjab.

Dr. Arora received her PhD in English from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Indore. She holds an MA and MPhil in English and a BA (Hons) in English from Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. She has also qualified the UGC-NTA NET in English. She received the Alliance of Digital Humanities Bursary Award to visit McGill University, Canada, in 2017 and the ASEM-DUO Fellowship to visit Lancaster University, UK, in 2020.

Dr. Arora’s research papers have been published in international journals such as South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (Taylor & Francis) and Contemporary South Asia (Taylor & Francis).

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Arora will document and analyze the culinary practices of refugees from regions such as Bahawalpur and Multan, focusing on how food functions as a living archive of displacement, resilience, and gendered memory. Her project is significant as South Asian Studies programs in the US are increasingly foregrounding micro-histories, gendered narratives, and diasporic memory in understanding Partition. This project will illustrate how domestic culinary practices serve as cultural repositories, particularly among women whose roles as preservers and transmitters of subregional identities through food remain critically underexplored.

Mohamed Haseeb Nechiyil

Dr. Mohamed Haseeb is an Assistant Professor of History at PSMO College (Autonomous), Tirurangadi, Kerala. He earned his BA in 2009 and MA in 2012 from the PSMO College affiliated to the University of Calicut, Kerala. In July 2025, he was awarded a PhD from Mangalore University in Karnataka. Dr. Mohamed Haseeb qualified for the UGC NET examination and was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship by the Indian Council of Historical Research.

Dr. Haseeb’s research interests are primarily in the fields of Indian Ocean history, the history of migration and water, and the Mappila songs of Malabar. He presented research papers at several conferences, including at the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD), British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE), and Royal Musical Association (RMA).

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Haseeb is focusing on the Mappila songs in the archival collection of Dutch ethnomusicologist Arnold Adriaan Bake. During his fellowship, Dr. Haseeb aims to reanalyze, repatriate, and digitalize the archival recordings, re-record the songs with translations into English, and repatriate them back to the Mappila community of Malabar, where the memory of these old songs has been lost, keeping in mind the idea of “archives for the future”.

Sonal

Dr. Sonal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Motilal Nehru College, University of Delhi, where she teaches the history of colonial India and different dimensions of Indian and world history. She has previously taught at various undergraduate colleges of Delhi University, including Ramjas, Lady Shri Ram, Kamala Nehru, and Shivaji College.

A former Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow and Visiting Fellow at Yale Centre for British Art, Dr Sonal’s research interests focus on material and visual culture during East India Company rule in India. Her doctoral research Textures of Exchange: The Maratha States, the Mughals, and the English East India Company examined material culture in diplomacy between Indian rulers and the Company (mid-18th to mid-19th century). Currently, she is exploring colonial India’s visual cultures.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow (Research and Teaching), Dr Sonal is investigating the satirical artworks published in the then-contemporary periodicals and newspapers that resonated with the sensibilities of the middle-class readership. She aims to unravel how caricatures reflected the socio-political commentary, serving as a medium for voices to critique the East India Company and British colonialism. In addition to her research, Dr. Sonal will teach visual cultures of colonial India and a survey course on Indian art.

Karen L Donoghue

Dr. Karen L. Donoghue is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong, Meghalaya. She obtained her BA from St. Anthony’s College, Shillong, which is affiliated with North-Eastern Hill University, in 2007 and completed her MA at Sikkim Manipal University in 2010. In July 2021, she was awarded a PhD by North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong, Meghalaya.

Dr. Donoghue’s research interests primarily lie in the fields of media representation, gender, and oral history, focusing on the intersection of media and self-representation, with oral history as a central method. She has published several research articles in reputable national and international journals. She was awarded a gold medal by North-Eastern Hill University for achieving first rank in her BA program.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Baylor University, Texas, Dr. Donoghue is focusing on the experiences, values, and practices of the Mizo diaspora in the United States through their oral histories. During her fellowship, she will examine migration patterns, community formation, and socio-political integration through lenses such as community collectives known as ‘pawls’ and the Mizo song tradition, as well as the role of technology and social media in preserving the cultural identity of the Mizo in the United States. Given the Mizo community’s predominantly Christian faith and the sizeable Christian population in the U.S., this project offers a unique perspective on transnational identity and solidarity.

Ajay Salunkhe

Mr. Ajay Salunkhe is a doctoral student in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. His doctoral research is located in the intertwined histories of photography, archaeology, and museum movement. His doctoral dissertation titled, Framing the Nation: How Museums Tell Stories of India Through Photographs, enquires into the shifting and layered relationship between museums and photographs in post-independent India. He is interested in the potential of photographs to communicate ideas and establish power relations by telling (or not telling) the story of India through her museums, as well as the dynamics of the interactions between visitors and photographs in museum space.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, his research aims to probe the institutional use of photography in the museum and curatorial practices, both in India and abroad, that contributed to the post-colonial Indian imagination, with special reference to the use of photographs in the Festival of India in the US (1985-1986).

He has several years of curatorial, exhibiting, and education experience as part of a museum’s outreach program, which has lent depth and dialogue to his research. He can be found taking long walks at any hour of the day, catching Pokémon, when he is not reading.

Sarita Sundar

Ms. Sarita Sundar’s practice and research spans heritage studies, visual culture, and design theory. She is the founder of Hanno, a heritage interpretation and design consultancy.

Ms. Sundar has a postgraduate degree in Visual Communications from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad and an M.A. in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester, UK where she was awarded the 2016 Professor Eilean Hooper-Greenhill Academic Prize. She is a visiting faculty at various design institutes: including NID, Ahmedabad; and Srishti Manipal School of Design and Technology, Bangalore. Her research ranges from studies of vernacular typography to looking at the intangible and material culture of performance practices in the temples of Valuvanad, Kerala (for which she received a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts). Her present research focuses on the cultural and design history of seats in India and will culminate in a publication in 2022.

Ms. Sundar’s Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship takes forward her multi-disciplinary research and seeks to address the lacuna of critical discourse in the discipline of design in India. By mapping the transcultural exchange of aesthetics and ideologies between India and the United States, and situating the interconnected events and dialogues, Ms. Sundar’s project looks at how these historical milestones continue to motivate and influence contemporary design, and associated fields such as curatorial practice in both countries. Furthermore, it examines the pathways followed by modernism and counter-movements like postmodernism, and their interactions with indigenous epistemology in Indian aesthetics and thought. She is also co-teaching a course, ‘Visualizing India’, at the University of Vermont.

Bhangya Bhukya

Dr. Bhangya Bhukya is a Professor of History at the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. He specializes in Modern Indian History. His research interests include community histories, the effects of power and knowledge, governmentality and dominance, the state and nationalism, intellectual histories of subaltern communities, identity politics by forest and hill people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was a Ford Foundation Fellow (2003-06) and a British Council Visiting Fellow (2010).

Dr. Bhukya did his Ph.D. from the University of Warwick, UK, and his thesis has been published as a book, Subjugated Nomads. The Lambadas under the rule of the Nizams in 2010. He published quite influential books, including The Roots of the Periphery. A history of the Deccan Gonds (2017), History of Modern Telangana (2017) and A Cultural History of Telangana (2021). He is also a public historian and activist involved in India’s Adivasi human rights movements.

Dr. Bhukya proposes to study why British colonial protectionism and post-colonial integrationism/assimilationism did not bring tangible changes in Adivasi life, particularly how these development approaches outweighed Adivasi self-rule and self-determinism; and, consequently, also their political rights. The study is theoretical in its nature, and it interrogates the philosophy, assumptions, and approaches of what is termed ‘Adivasi development’ and proposes to re-investigate what development has actually meant to Adivasis.

P.K. Yasser Arafath

Dr. P.K. Yasser Arafath is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delhi and a historian of medieval and early modern India. He was L.M. Singhi Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 2017.

Dr. Arafath received his Ph.D. from the University of Hyderabad, and his research primarily focuses on South India. He is interested in its intellectual traditions, transliterated literature, history of violence, communities in the Indian Ocean, and the cultural history of the body and hygiene in the region. He has co-edited Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction (Routledge, 2021) and The Hijab: Islam, Women and the Politics of Clothing (Simon & Schuster, 2022). Dr. Arafath won the prestigious Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer Best Published Paper Award (2020–2021) for his research article that he published in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Arafath is examining how a section of South Asian Islamic scholars shaped the gender sensibilities of the Mappila-Muslims of Malabar by engaging with multiple discourses within the region and beyond in the 19th century. His project aims to do a systematic study of gender and sexuality in Arabi-Malayalam, a transliterated textual tradition in the Indian Ocean region that entails writing Malayalam —the native tongue of Kerala —in Arabic script. This study will add to the existing body of knowledge on gendered Islam in South Asia and gender discourses in South Asian Islamic cultures in the 19th century.