Field of Study USA: Anthropology

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.

Andrew Ashley

Mr. Andrew Ashley, a medical anthropologist and PhD candidate at New York University, studies how people live with diabetes and other chronic health concerns in India and among the Indian diaspora in the United States. In particular, Mr. Ashley is interested in the intersection of health, science, agriculture, and technology to see how scientists manipulate seeds themselves to provide better healthcare. Mr. Ashley’s work also provides a comparative look at living with Type II diabetes in India and in the United States. Previously, Mr. Ashley has conducted research on the possibilities and limits of multicultural governance strategies in a former mill town in northern England; the evolving cultural landscape of suburban North Carolina; and the complications and anxieties of life on student and temporary work visa for IT migrants from India to the United States. Mr. Ashley has conducted fieldwork on South Asian diasporas in northern England; The “Research Triangle” of North Carolina; Chicagoland; and New York and New Jersey metro area. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina; a master’s degree in Geography from the University of Kentucky; and master’s degrees with a focus on Anthropology from the University of Chicago and NYU. Mr. Ashley is also a filmmaker and a recipient of the Culture and Media certificate from NYU. His most recent film Sehnsucht (2021) looks at the shifting landscape of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the effect these layers have on him. Mr. Ashley also plans to make a film during his Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, around his research.

Mr. Ashley aims to conduct his dissertation research on living with diabetes in Hyderabad. He aims to conduct ethnographic fieldwork with people diagnosed with Type I or Type II diabetes, their family members and caregivers, and doctors and other medical health professionals and researchers. Mr. Ashley seeks to also conduct ethnographic fieldwork with crop scientists and medical researchers who are working to create new forms of low Glycemic Index rice. In particular, Mr. Ashley hopes to understand how this focus on rice echoes and also shifts previous Indian agricultural development projects since Independence; and what role crop scientists feel they have in combating this diabetes epidemic.

Frances Walker

Frances Walker has a bachelor’s in anthropology (medical) from Princeton University, New Jersey, with minors in global health and health policy; gender, sex, and sexuality; and African American studies. After graduating in 2022 as a Princeton University Henry R. Labouisse ’26 Fellow, Frances worked on the ground with Humans for Humanity, an Indian NGO, on its menstrual health and wellness campaigns and projects. Her current research work is a continuation of her previous senior thesis research titled “Deconstructing Menstruation in India: From Stigma to Visibility in Non-Governmental Organizations”, on historical stigma and taboo regarding menstruation and their contemporary consequences for menstruators in India.

Prior to working and researching in India, Frances served as the assistant manager of Semicolon Bookstore in Chicago where she organized literature-based community service events benefiting hundreds of Chicago kids; she also curated speaking engagements for authors. As a student, Frances was the president of the Princeton Women’s Rugby Football Club and served on its alumni board, as well as worked as a Princeton Writing Center Fellow to help undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty with a variety of academic-writing projects. She also served as a multi-year volunteer at Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center in the emergency medicine and orthopedics departments. Frances is still an avid fan of rugby and plays it in her free time. Outside of this, she loves trekking, traveling, and trying new foods.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Frances is seeking to further understand the current shift in India towards more sustainable and eco-friendly menstruation products. For this, she is locating the key actors in the realm of sustainable menstruation in order to determine why and how these products are marketed, as well as to understand what drives these entities to create change. She is also looking into the barriers that restrict the menstruators’ ability to switch to these products, and also examining the consequences of burgeoning menstrual waste as the majority of India’s population moved to using sanitary napkins in the last 10 years.

Evan Tims

Evan Tims is interested in the relationship between water, climate planning, and development in South Asia. Evan first traveled to Kolkata in 2018 as a Critical Language Scholar, and again in 2019 on the same grant, which were opportunities that allowed him to develop his skills in Bangla. In 2019, he graduated from Bard College with a joint major in written arts and human rights with a focus on anthropology. He then worked for the City Government of New York for almost two years before being named a Henry J. Luce Scholar. As a Luce Scholar, Evan studied in Nepal and researched water planning in the hydropower sector with Policy Entrepreneurs Inc., a Kathmandu-based NGO. He also studied and worked with a number of other organizations, including La.Lit magazine, where he conducted a creative writing workshop on climate change. This project led him to conduct more workshops and publish several works of climate storytelling from young writers in Nepal and Bangladesh. Currently, Evan works as a program associate with Activate, a U.S. nonprofit that funds scientists working on climate-related technologies.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Evan is conducting ethnographic research on the perceptions about Kolkata’s water future among distinct communities with connections to the Hooghly River. By balancing his work between groups of urban planners and those who have other relationships with the river, he is studying the differences between professionalized, scientific, and lived experiences of Kolkata’s water. Evan is also seeking to understand the complex, layered relationships between stakeholder communities as they seek to negotiate the future of water in a rapidly developing city.

Manjot Multani

Manu Multani is a PhD candidate in anthropology and social change at the California Institute of Integral Studies in California. The institute has set its professional goals with the intention to not only emphasize the struggles of South Asian (SA) communities but also to seek, recognize, and name the solutions through which SA communities can resist. Manu has co-founded a podcast, ReThink Desi, to showcase such narratives. She is also an emerging filmmaker who focuses on visual aesthetics and storytelling for social change.

Manu has worked as a health program planner for several years for the Department of Public Health in San Francisco, engaging in local community discussions regarding public services such as hospital-based care, food insecurity, and homelessness; this has resulted in her acquiring expertise in understanding the lived realities of social determinants of health and disparities. Manu is also a two-time recipient of the Critical Language Scholarship for Panjabi in addition to the Hollywood Foreign Press Scholarship, Student Scholarship at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Education, and the Public Health Hero Award. She also has a master’s in global health and a bachelor’s in philosophy.

Manu currently lives in Los Angeles, California, with her partner and pup. During their free time, they like to read culturally diverse cookbooks to integrate new spices and techniques into their own cooking.

For her Fulbright-Nehru multimodal ethnographic study, Manu is investigating how young North Indian adults define and experience romantic, healthy relationships and how these reciprocally inform their sexual scripts. Through qualitative in-depth interviews and a participatory action research methodology – whereby the participants document short videos – she is attempting to produce a visual ethnography truer to the real experiences of the participants. Overall, this project unravels how sexual health and sexuality education become a part of what is known as “sexual literacy”, thereby contributing to the dearth of scholarship on North Indian youth sexualities.

Markal Kelly

Markal Kelly, a Miami, Florida, native, was raised in Broward County. He is a recent graduate from Morehouse College where he studied international affairs and Portuguese. Previously, he worked for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Office of Economic and Regional Affairs in the Bureau of African Affairs. He recently concluded his internship with Global Ties where he contributed to the global projects proposed by the exchange alumni.

Markal is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Gilman Scholarship, the Frederick Douglass Global Fellowship, the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange Scholarship, the United States Foreign Service Two-year Internship, and the Charles B. Rangel Scholarship. Additionally, he has been named a Panda Cares Scholar, an Oprah Winfrey Scholar, and an Exchange Alumni Ambassador. Markal aspires to become a diplomat and promote international education. Following his Fulbright experience, he plans to attend Johns Hopkins University in Italy to receive his master’s in international service as a Thomas R. Pickering fellow.

Since Markal believes that “how we live” is intrinsically related to “how we die”, his Fulbright-Nehru study relates the notions of life and death. His research is examining how social systems like religion were created to answer life’s existential problems and how sacred religious rituals are to different civilizations. Markal’s research in India is set to provide a deep understanding of Hinduism, its ethical–philosophical discourses, and the economic implications of Indian death rites. He is also investigating how societal systems, such as India’s caste hierarchy, influence how and what behaviors people engage in, based on their financial and social standing. Besides, he is evaluating how globalization, changes inside India, and even global conflicts have affected traditions and practices. Through this research, he will also be concluding his narrative about one of the holiest towns in the world for Hindus, Varanasi, which is ironically regarded as a place where people come to both “live” and “die”. By the end of his research, Markal hopes to have properly identified and comprehended the narratives of death rites that are inherent to the Hindu scriptures.

Lily Bello

Lily Bello is a recent graduate from CUNY’s Brooklyn College where she received a BA in anthropology with a minor in LGBT studies. Her studies focused on qualitative ethnographic research methodologies as well as on transgender cultures and human rights law. She has research experience – funded via internships, academic programs, and research awards – studying activist movements and community landownership. Besides her academic pursuits, Lily has both personal and professional experience in transgender rights activism, including by working with the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, a firm focused on human rights law as it applies to transgender communities. Following her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Lily will be pursuing PhD programs in anthropology to study the relationship between transgender human rights law and the decolonial conceptions of gender-variant identity.

Lily’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the emerging relationship between contemporary personal law and traditional modes of communal housing among hijra and other gender-variant communities. This ethnographic study is taking place in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru in order to account for local cultural differences in the housing practices of these communities. The research is addressing the relationship between legal structures and the social organization of gender-variant communities, and thus contributing to a broader discourse on the application of human rights law to such communities within their local cultural contexts.