Anthropology Archives

Sarah Khan

Sarah Khan graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where she majored in culture and politics with a concentration in race, caste, gender, and postcolonial development. Through her coursework, she deepened her understanding of the relationships among labor, capital, and the state with gender, desirability, and social mobility. Her senior thesis explored the construction of Muslim masculinities and femininities through techno-sex economies, wherein she analyzed the racialized nature of libidinal economies and offered a critique of Western liberal feminism. In addition to her academic work, Sarah is deeply passionate about teaching. She has served as an instructor for the Yale Young Global Scholars Program, a volunteer teacher for low-income youth in Washington, DC, through Georgetown University’s Center for Social Justice, and as an ESL instructor for newly resettled refugees in Atlanta through the International Rescue Committee.

As a recipient of the U.S. State Department’s critical language scholarship, Sarah studied the politics and poetics of her ancestral language, Urdu, in Lucknow during the summer of 2024. Most recently, she served as a fellow with the American India Foundation’s Banyan Impact Fellowship, working with the Hyderabad-based NGO Kriti Social Initiatives on the strategic implementation of economic empowerment initiatives for marginalized women.

Sarah’s Fulbright-Nehru project is using caste as an analytical framework to understand the lineage- and labor-based system of social stratification among Indian Muslims. To contextualize, conceptualize, and dismantle Ashraf (upper-caste) supremacy, her work is investigating how hyper endogamy functions as a mechanism through which caste rigidity is articulated, legitimized, and perpetuated. Through ethnographic research in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, Sarah is exploring how caste operates in and through class, educational background, and spatiality (urban/rural); she is also particularly focusing on the gendered dynamics of marriage and social mobility.

Anya Fredsell

Anya Fredsell is a doctoral student in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. Her academic interests include South Asian religions, Tamil language and culture, gender and sexuality studies, and ethnography of religion. Her research relies on ethnographic methodologies to examine relationships among families, land, and deities in contemporary Tamil Nadu, India. Anya received her BA in religious studies from Elon University and an MTS in global religions from Emory’s Candler School of Theology.

Anya’s Fulbright-Nehru research project on place-based Hindu deities is examining, through ethnographic fieldwork, the shifting relationships between families, land, and religious practices in contemporary South India. Her research is analyzing the worship of Tamil lineage deities (kula devams) – the gods who are passed down generationally in families and who reside on ancestral land – to explore how conceptions of lineage and religious devotion are intimately tied to land and negotiated through the worship of place-based deities in South India. Despite contemporary processes of urbanization and migration that relocate families away from their native land, Tamil people continue to worship these deities by returning to ancestral villages or conducting elaborate rituals to permanently move their deities closer to the family. Drawing on her established research contacts and advanced Tamil language proficiency, Anya is following such movements of people and place-based deities by observing festivals and life-cycle rites, and through semi-structured interviews on family histories and deity narratives. The study is taking place in a village near the urban center of Madurai, Tamil Nadu. This project will form the basis of Anya’s doctoral dissertation at Emory University and is expected to culminate in her first book.

Aidan Cox

Aidan Cox, a graduate of the University of South Florida, earned a summa cum laude degree in anthropology and world languages and cultures, with a concentration in applied linguistics and French and Francophone studies. His passion lies in the worldwide preservation and revitalization of minority language. Aidan has conducted linguistic research on Telugu, French, Spanish, and other languages. He has presented his findings at English and French conferences. His focus has been on the Telugu-speaking region of South India, a unique area for linguistic study. His previous projects include “Properly Cheppu: Early Balanced Bilingualism in a Telugu-English Household”, “Pedagogy of Telugu Verb Structure”, and “A Linguistic Sketch of Telugu”.

Aidan’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is conducting fieldwork in India to deepen understanding of linguistic attitudes and social behaviors. He is integrating methods from sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology to develop innovative approaches that benefit minority and tribal populations. Working with the University of Hyderabad, he is specifically exploring interactions in the Kui language among the Kandha tribe in order to examine language’s role in identity, cultural heritage, and indigeneity. He is also analyzing Kui language-use patterns, including ideologies surrounding the language. One of the aims of the project is to combat the decline of endangered languages.

Hansini Bhasker

Hansini Bhasker is a Tamil (ethno)musicologist, multi-genre vocalist, performer, composer, and improviser from Connecticut who deploys embodied music-making and movement for socio-ecological healing and change. She recently received her master’s in music (performance and ethnomusicology) from Wesleyan University. Earlier, she graduated summa cum laude with a degree in music (composition and musicology) from Princeton University, with certificates in vocal performance, cognitive science, entrepreneurship, and finance. She is a YoungArts winner in Voice and winner of the concerto competition of Wesleyan whose musical practice and research bridge across Karnatak, Western classical opera and early choral repertory, French chanson, jazz, pop, musical theater, gospel, R&B, Kazakh folk, Javanese gamelan, and experimental soundscape and extended vocal techniques. Her master’s thesis explored cross-cultural contrasts, evolutions, and interactions in the use and control of vibration, timbre variation, and pitch oscillation in vocalization. Following her Fulbright year, she will be pursuing a PhD in ethnomusicology, dwelling further on questions related to performers’ identity-making through interactions related to the physical environment, accessibility, and legal and sociocultural contexts. She is an avid lover of food, languages, reading, biking, and “musicking”.

Hansini’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is examining how Karnatak performers in Chennai navigate relations between mind, body, ability, and self; the study is based within three distinct contexts: the Tamil Nadu state; the nation of India; and U.S. diasporic organizations. She believes that the current inflectional moment – which celebrates local artists with disability by combining Indian concepts of disability with Western ideas introduced through migratory diasporic engagement – offers an exceptional and timely case study to explore how people negotiate legal and sociocultural conditions in framing and claiming their identities.

Ramya Arumilli

Ramya Arumilli is a recent graduate of Barnard College, where she studied medical anthropology and Sanskrit. Passionate about South Asian medical knowledge systems, expansive modes of healing, and gynecological healthcare, Ramya’s academic interests lie at the intersection of medical anthropology, religion, and feminist science and technology studies.

As a Laidlaw Scholar at Barnard, she studied menstrual health practices in India within the contexts of Ayurveda, Hindu goddess worship, public health interventions, and media representation. Her senior thesis, titled “Religiopolitical Care: Pro- and Anti-Abortion Advocacy in New York City”, was an ethnographic study of abortion-centered religious and political advocacy groups, and of the protest site of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Manhattan. Through these experiences, she was exposed to Hindu and Christian theological conceptions of reproduction in South Asia and the West.

Throughout her undergraduate years, Ramya was a research assistant at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, where she supported and produced feminist research on social movements using archives and oral histories. She was also the co-lead organizer of the Reproductive Justice Collective and a scientific review editor for GYNECA, Columbia University’s undergraduate gynecological health journal. In her free time, she enjoys reading feminist literature, cooking, visiting museums, and practicing yoga.

Ramya’s Fulbright-Nehru research program is studying three significant modes of healing in the Indian Subcontinent – biomedical, spiritual, and indigenous – within the context of fertility treatments in the Telugu-speaking states of India. Her research is based in the cities of Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, and Rajahmundry, where she is analyzing – within the contexts of gender, religious beliefs, political affiliation, locality, caste, and socioeconomic status – the treatment methods chosen by families seeking fertility care. She is also studying cases in which Ayurveda and other forms of traditional medicine (such as Unani, Siddha, naturopathy, and homeopathy) are prioritized, and how this balances with forms of biomedicine such as IVF. Her research is expected to inform the fertility care provided in biomedical contexts, thereby supporting a patient through as many modes as necessary.

Abhijeet Paul

Dr. Abhijeet Paul is lecturer in South and Southeast Asian studies at UC Berkeley and lecturer in ethnic studies in the Peralta Community College District. He is also affiliated faculty in the Contemporary Center on India, a research body at UC Berkeley. Dr. Paul teaches and researches South Asian, ethnic, and global studies, specializing in environmental justice and humanities, South Asian and Asian-American literatures and cultures, as well as environmental media. He is currently a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow affiliated with West Bengal State University researching the jute community, environmental justice, and globalization for a monograph to be completed in 2023–24. He has published several articles on: jute culture, ecology, and community; digital community and fakes; and biopolitics and seed sovereignty. He has made presentations in numerous conferences in India, the US, and Europe, and has been interviewed by the National Public Radio of Washington, D.C., and New Philosopher of Australia. He plans to premiere his film, Bhatti (The Kiln) in India in 2022. He has a PhD in South and Southeast Asian studies with a designated emphasis on critical theory from UC Berkeley and a PhD in English (American literature) from the University of Calcutta. His first Fulbright experience was as an Indian doctoral researcher in the US, and the second as a Fulbright-Nehru US scholar in India. He loves to travel and meet people.

Jute, Bengal’s “golden fiber”, is rooted in sustainability and well suited to local agroecologies; its cultivation has the potential for carbon sequestration and soil restoration, while jute products are environmentally friendly and compostable. Dr. Paul’s Fulbright-Hays project is exploring the local, cultural, and community aspects of jute’s reinvention as a green commodity in order to understand sustainability practices, climate change, and the challenges of adapting to new technologies. The project is examining the many roles of the jute plant in the oral and written cultural forms of India and South Asia. These self-representations by farmers and workers complement and complicate the scientific-technological narratives of agroecology, diversification, and global jute marketing.

Sarah Pinto

Prof. Sarah Pinto is a Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. Her research and teaching addresses cultures and histories of biomedicine in South Asia, especially as they pertain to kinship and gender. Most recently she has been working on histories of psychiatry in South Asia, with a focus on diagnoses related to “hysteria.” She is author of three books, Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India (Berghahn 2008), Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India (University of Pennsylvania Press 2014), which was awarded the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize for ethnographic writing on gender and health, and The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis (Women Unlimited 2019/Fordham University Press 2020), and numerous scholarly articles. Her current efforts consider concepts of the “good death” as they emerge in and beyond bioethical framings, highly collaborative models for ethnographic research and teaching, and writing at the intersections of ethnography, history, and fiction.

During her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Pinto intends to involve several interlinked components: teaching a seminar-style workshop for graduate students, conducting preliminary ethnographic research, and building a collaborative research paradigm for ongoing work. The theme of these efforts is contemporary concepts of “good death” in West Bengal. Amid rapid changes in the Indian medical and legal landscape of end-of-life care, Prof. Pinto asks how ideas about a good death are formed and reformed at the juncture of medicine, law, religion, and everyday life. What does a good death look like in and beyond global bioethical formulations?

Meredith Stinger

Ms. Meredith Stinger has a Bachelor’s in Sociology & Anthropology with a minor in Political Economy from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR. After graduating, Ms. Stinger was an Americorps VISTA member at a Portland nonprofit, building and managing community relationships to broaden educational opportunities for underserved students of color. As an undergraduate, she was an editor for the Synergia Journal of Gender and Thought Expression, studied abroad in India, and was awarded honors for her senior thesis research in 2019.

Prior to the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Stinger has worked as a Program Coordinator for an equity-focused education nonprofit, specializing in graphic design, marketing and data management. Ms. Stinger enjoys drawing, design, sewing and running in her spare time.

Ms. Stinger’s Fulbright-Nehru research explores the role that India’s Aadhaar biometric identification system has played in accessing healthcare resources throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as well as in efforts to track the virus through contact tracing. The use of biometrics and digital identification for resource allocation and contact-tracing is a topic of international discussion and funding, with high-stakes implications for those navigating these new systems. Ms. Stinger seeks to engage in this international discourse through research on how Indian citizens pursue state healthcare resources in the midst of a major public health crisis, and how their strategies are facilitated and/or impeded by the Aadhaar program.

Alexa Russo

Ms. Alexa Russo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her PhD project analyzes the growing farmer producer organization/cooperative and sustainable agriculture movements in India, focusing on the role of gender in the imagining and formations of rural economic futures. Ms. Russo began her studies at Amherst College where she received a BA in Economics and Religion (with honors) in 2012. While studying abroad in Bodh Gaya and Banaras, Ms. Russo completed an ethnographic project of worshippers of Hanuman and Sri Lankan pilgrims, and after graduation, co-authored “A Dream Experiment in Development Economics” in the Journal of Economic Education.

Ms. Russo subsequently received a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, in which she conducted ethnographic research of women’s self-help groups in a remote Rajasthani village. In preparation for the fellowship, Ms. Russo began Hindi language learning, and has continued for many years after, reaching a distinguished level of proficiency. After her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Russo worked for three years at J.P. Morgan where she acquired further insights into financial frameworks through analyses of socially motivated institutions as well as financial and non-financial companies. Ms. Russo then received an MSc in Gender (with Distinction) from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2017 and received the Best Performance Prize in her degree. In her master’s thesis, Ms. Russo analyzed how representations of women within a rural Gujarati embroidery cooperative are negotiated across globally circulating discourses on entrepreneurship and third-world “authenticity.” She later published her thesis in The Journal of Law, Social Justice and Global Development. After this program, Ms. Russo expanded her on-the-ground understanding of gender within NGO networks through her work in women’s rights advocacy at Rutgers University’s Center for Women’s Global Leadership. While on Stanford campus, Ms. Russo has been a committed student worker organizer, leading graduate student advocacy on affordable housing, childcare, and other critical services, as well as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. For this work, Ms. Russo received the Stanford University’s 2020 Community Impact Award. She is an avid meditator and recreational yogi, and enjoys her new found hobby as a novice photographer.

Rural India currently faces intersecting economic and ecological crises that have also exacerbated social inequalities. In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Russo aims to analyze how various actors address India’s agrarian challenges through forms of sustainable agriculture, with the cooperative as a key structure of implementation, and women as pivotal agents of change. Ms. Russo aims to investigate how different actors envision sustainable agrarian futures in India as well as the practices and ideals of labor, gender, and sociality that constitute a sustainable cooperative. Her project also analyzes how political alignments, relationships, and positionality within policy networks shape and enable various agrarian imaginings.

Andrew Kerr

Mr. Andrew Kerr is currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology. His research world revolves around questions of poetry, semiotics, emotion, and sociality. Meanwhile, his commitments and passions are to always be engaged in collaborative work that centers human dignity. Mr. Kerr is a previous fellow with the American India Foundation and Urdu language resident director in Lucknow for the South Asia Flagship Language Initiative. He holds a BSc in Physics from Austin Peay State University, an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago, and is always seeking to learn more.

Mr. Kerr’s Fulbright-Nehru project engages contemporary poetry in North India as not only literature or art, but also as a medium of popular expression that carries affective force in the public sphere. This study is taking place in Delhi, Lucknow, and Mumbai to explore questions about the public sphere, publics, affect, and imaginations of being Indian. The highlight on Urdu poetry, especially, will address the dearth of ethnographic analysis in Urdu studies, while also bringing an extended study of Urdu poetry in India into the growing body of literature in the anthropology of poetry.