Language/Literature/Linguistics Archives

Tushar Rishi

Mr. Tushar Rishi is a PhD candidate at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. As a Senior Research Fellow, his doctoral project focuses on questions of form, style, and critique in J. M. Coetzee’s fiction. He has a master’s in English from the same center and a bachelor’s in English from Hindu College, University of Delhi.

Tushar’s interests include contemporary literature, global modernisms, postcolonial culture, and creative writing. His postgraduate work on cultural theory has been published in an anthology by Würzburg University Press, and he has presented his research on contemporary literature at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, supported by an ICSSR grant. He has also participated in two cultural studies seminars organized by Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Germany under the DAAD IVAC initiative. His novel, The Patient Patient (Westland Books), was shortlisted for Best Debut English Novel at PILF 2017. It was translated into Hindi a year later. His short fiction has been shortlisted for the 2023 Toto Awards for Creative Writing in English and longlisted for the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow, Tushar is keen to expand his ongoing research on Coetzee’s literary work and deepen his understanding of theory, modernisms, and post critique. In his free time, he enjoys movies, cricket, and chess.

Gazal Khan

Ms. Gazal Khan is a doctoral candidate and a teaching assistant at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. She completed her graduation and post-graduate studies in English from Aligarh Muslim University. Gazal is a recipient of the Charles Wallace Fellowship for archival research in the United Kingdom and has been a Visiting Doctoral Student at the University of Oxford (Trinity Term 2026). Her research examines the temporality and spatiality of borderland identities within transnational histories of violence.

Gazal’s work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals, including The English Academy Review, Peace Review, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, as well as in edited anthologies. She has presented her research at several international conferences across India, the UK and the U.S. She has been awarded the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research grant for presenting her work at the Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention (NMLAAC) 2026 and a fully funded travel grant from the Frank and Debbie Driesman Foundation, Potomac, USA, for her paper presentation at the NMLAAC 2024.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow, Gazal is working in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies and refugee studies to study the process of mediation in the [re]presentation and narrativization of the traumatic episodes of the Rohingya refugee crisis. Gazal is an avid traveler who enjoys exploring landscapes and cultures, with adventures in trekking, rafting, desert safaris, and snow skiing, and a passion for Bollywood music.

Ira Raja

Prof. Ira Raja is Professor of English at the University of Delhi. She received her PhD from La Trobe University, Australia. She works at the intersection of postcolonial studies, ageing, and material culture, with a focus on Indian literary and visual cultures. Her research examines how experiences of care, memory, and everyday life are shaped by, and in turn reshape, broader formations of identity, nation, and migration. She has published widely in journals such as Journal of Aging Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Thesis Eleven, and has edited and co-edited several books, including Grey Areas: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Fiction on Ageing.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Prof. Raja is exploring memory as a relational and culturally embedded process. Drawing on contemporary Indian fiction, her project challenges medicalized approaches that frame ageing primarily in terms of decline, showing how forgetting can also enable reinterpretation, selfhood, and social connection. By bringing multilingual Indian literary archives into dialogue with global debates in memory and ageing studies, the project contributes a South Asian perspective to interdisciplinary conversations in the humanities and the medical humanities.

Aleena Manoharan

Dr. Aleena Manoharan is Associate Professor at the Department of English, CMS College Kottayam, Kerala, where she teaches courses on literary theory, literary criticism, American and European literatures. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Madras and specializes in ecocriticism, with particular focus on the concept of bioregion as an ecocritical tool to analyze literary texts. She is the author of the book Bioregion and Indigeneity in Literary Imagination (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023) and has significant academic publications to her credit. She has delivered several keynote lectures and plenary talks on ecocriticism for seminars and has presented papers at national and international conferences, both in India and abroad.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Manoharan is continuing to focus on bioregional studies in the wake of present environmental and ecological crises. Her project focuses on understanding the intersections between the land-based theories, bioregion and tinai, and their implications in ecocritical pedagogy and research. Dr. Manoharan will also examine the pedagogical strategies required to effectively facilitate teaching and research practices based on these theories, particularly their application to the study of indigenous literatures.

Mawonthing Ngashangva

Dr Ng Mawonthing is an independent scholar whose research centers on Tangkhul proverbs as vital expressions of cultural knowledge. Her doctoral work involved the systematic documentation and analysis of these proverbs, with particular attention to their rhetorical structures, social functions, and embedded worldviews, contributing to the preservation of an endangered linguistic and cultural heritage. She earned her BA and MA in English from the English and Foreign Languages University, Shillong, and was awarded PhD by the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati in 2025.

Dr Mawonthing’s broader academic interests include paremiology, folklore studies, and digital humanities, particularly community-driven approaches to cultural preservation.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Fuller Theological Seminary, California, Dr Mawonthing is developing a bilingual dictionary of Tangkhul-English proverbs, envisioned as a resource for both scholars and the wider public, making ancestral knowledge more accessible to younger generations while fostering cross-cultural understanding and dialogue.

Manisha Mohanty

Dr. Manisha Mohanty is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan Deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha. She completed her PhD in English from Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar. Her doctoral research examined the intersections of food, gender, and identity in Indian and diasporic women’s food memoirs through the frameworks of feminist food studies, cultural studies, and gastro-politics. She earned her MPhil and MA in English from Utkal University, Odisha, where she was awarded the University Gold Medal for securing the highest rank at postgraduate level.

Dr. Mohanty’s research interests include food, gender, and cultural studies. Her work has been published in the journals Food, Culture & Society and the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, and she has contributed chapters to edited volumes published by Bloomsbury and Routledge. She is also the author of the forthcoming book Food Cultures of India: Cuisine, Customs, and Issues (Bloomsbury, 2027).

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Mohanty is researching Indian American foodways between 1993 and 2013 by examining community cookbooks, family recipe collections, and early digital food content. Her project examines how culinary texts function as sites of cultural preservation, adaptation, and resistance within Indian American diaspora. The project investigates how recipes reflect evolving gender roles, negotiations of identity, and everyday acts of resilience in the context of globalization and changing American food culture.

Hindol Chakraborty

Dr. Hindol Chakraborty is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Swami Vivekananda University, West Bengal. He earned his BA (Hons) in English from Narasinha Dutt College under University of Calcutta in 2010. He received a master’s degree in English literature from Aliah University, Kolkata in 2012. His PhD was awarded by Jharkhand Rai University, Ranchi in 2022.

Dr. Chakraborty’s primary research areas include the art and the sublime, memory studies, post-genocide literature and the Girardian theory of mimesis in Indian literature. He has published widely in various national and international journals and also contributed to several edited volumes published by renowned houses including Imprint, SLC India Publishers and Routledge. He is the translator of Rantidev Sengupta’s historical fiction Ishqnama. His research article on virtual reality literature and a co-edited volume on Eastern Himalayan literature will be published by Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge respectively.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Fellow at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, Dr. Chakraborty is focusing on the transmission of the traumatic memory of the Armenian genocide across generations through the lens of postmemory, centering on the functionality of gendered postmemory among select Armenian-American and Armenian-Indian women writers. He aims to contribute to broader discussions on the representation of the American and Indian roles in nurturing the sentiment of the post-genocide Armenian diaspora. Dr. Chakraborty is also a President’s award winner for singing and composing ghazals and a harmonium exponent.

Diptarup Ghosh Dastidar

Dr. Diptarup Ghosh Dastidar earned his BA (Hons) in 2014 from Serampore College, affiliated with University of Calcutta, and completed his MA in 2016 at Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Varanasi. In December 2023, he was awarded a PhD from BHU. Dr. Ghosh Dastidar was a research intern at National Institute of Technology, Trichy in July 2019, where he worked on graphic medicine.

Dr. Ghosh Dastidar’s research interests lie primarily in comics studies, spatiality, visual cultures, graphic medicine, ludology, and Indology. He has published several research articles in SCOPUS-indexed international journals such as Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (JHU Press), and The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Taylor & Francis). He has qualified for the CBSE-UGC NET examination, and was also awarded the Teach-for-BHU (TfB) Fellowship from August 2023 to July 2024. He worked as Assistant Professor at Amity University Chhattisgarh from 2020 to 2022.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Ghosh Dastidar is focusing on the nature and history of the American graphic novel with respect to the growth and development of the Indian counterpart, with special emphasis on community interactions and exploration of the American “comics world” (Beaty 2012). He is exploring the network of comics scholarship and practice in the USA and bridging it with the Indian comics network, while deliberating on establishing authority on the idea of the graphic novel as a genre.

Nirmala Menon

Prof. Nirmala Menon is a Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), IIT Indore, and leads the Digital Humanities and Publishing Research Group. Prof Menon is the Chair of J. P. Narayan National Centre of Excellence in the Humanities at IIT Indore and is an affiliate Research Professor with the University of Oxford. She is the author of four books with the latest Practices of Digital Humanities in India: Learning by Doing (Routledge, 2024). She is also the co-editor of the first multilingual volume of e-literature published from India (2024). Prof. Menon has received various national and international grants and awards (MHRD, SPARC, UKEIRI, and Academia Europaea among others). She has also hosted Fulbright Scholars in her lab and along with her students, received international awards such as Charles Wallace Fellowship, Zubaan Sasakawa Publishing prize and ASEM-DUO fellowship.

During her Fulbright Research Fellowship, Prof. Menon will be working on a book project that explores the challenges and possibilities of developing a multilingual scholarly publishing ecosystem. The book examines the infrastructural, economic and intellectual challenges of developing a robust scholarly publishing set-up in the coming years. New technologies along with the rapid advancement of AI tools will shape the direction and policies of scholarly communication in the coming years and this book looks at issues of language and access within that discourse. Prof. Menon will also be working with Prof. Julia Flanders on the DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly Journal and contribute to and learn from its best practices.

Rutwij Nakhwa

Mr. Rutwij Nakhwa is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. His dissertation is on Hegel’s political philosophy. His research interests lie in Marx, psychoanalysis, film and literary theory, and B. R. Ambedkar. Since 2018, he has taught and guest-lectured at the Mass Media Department of St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. For years, Rutwij covered India’s film festivals as a journalist and in various other capacities. He has written on cinema for The Hindu. He holds a post-graduate diploma in critical theory, aesthetics, and practice from Jnanapravaha Mumbai (2018) and a bachelor’s degree in Mass Media (Journalism) from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai (2017).

In 2024, Rutwij’s paper, ‘An Absolute Hegelianism for Postmodern Times: Hegel with Lacan after Bataille and Derrida’, was published in the Filozofija i društvo/Philosophy and Society journal. He has presented his work on Hegel at several conferences including those organised by Hegelian and philosophical societies, and on Ambedkar at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Rutwij’s interdisciplinary work will interface Hegel’s philosophy with poetic and literary work, primarily that of Samuel Beckett. His research aims at a philosophical-literary examination of (conceptual and figural) endings and beginnings in relation to our time of repetitive crises, a time in which even the imagination of alternatives seems impossible. In response, this project’s wager is to think of a different repetition, which will pinpoint the peculiar conditions of possibility for imagination and creation of alternatives, allowing for a transformative reactualization of Hegel’s philosophy, for our present.