Gender Studies Archives

Maya Taylor

Ms. Maya Nashva Lyon Taylor graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in Public Health and Asian Studies and a minor in Spanish. In her time as a student, she was a Research Assistant in Dr. Gilbert Gonzales’ LGBTQ+ health laboratory. Ms. Taylor’s specific interest in the health of bisexual folks, like herself, led her to study how having a same-sex or opposite-sex partner could impact the mental health, physical health, and substance use of bi+ folks across the United States. Under Dr. Gonzales’ mentorship, Ms. Taylor published a paper that encapsulated this work entitled, “Health Disparities Among Women by Sexual Orientation Identity and Same-Sex or Different-Sex Cohabiting Partnership Status” in the journal Women’s Health Issues.

While taking a semester to study in Delhi, Ms. Taylor began studying how the 2019 Transgender Persons Protection of Rights Act mandating folks to get surgery in order to change their legal gender marker was affecting trans and other gender diverse folk in India. She spoke to several trans activists and medical providers and documented their experiences. Ms. Taylor plans to continue and expand this work during her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship. In the last year of college, Ms. Taylor wrote a thesis applying medical sociology theories of historical trauma to the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. As a part of her thesis, she wrote a short story about an Indian doctor treating patients dying of HIV/AIDS in New York City whose physician parents lived through the Partition and participated in mass sterilization campaigns of the Emergency era. After graduation, Ms. Taylor worked as a Health Educator at the Center on Halsted, a social service agency in Chicago, providing HIV testing, PrEP Navigation, and Care Coordination for her clients in English and Spanish. In her free time, Ms. Taylor loves to try cooking new dishes, playing instruments, and going for hikes.

Under the 2019 Transgender Person’s (Protection of Rights) Act, discrimination against trans people is criminalized. Despite these protections, the Act requires trans/gender diverse Indians to undergo surgery before they can legally change their gender. This study aims to determine how the Act impacts the health of transgender communities by investigating how legal documentation of gender shapes access to health resources, how healthcare providers are held accountable for providing high quality gender-affirming care, how trans and gender diverse people hope to change this Act to better reflect their needs, and how this Act impacts gender diverse visibility in society.

Laila Durrani

Ms. Laila Noor Durrani is a recent graduate of Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was born in New York City, and is of Indian origin. She holds a BA in Mathematics and Government, with a focus on global political systems. She has worked for a number of non-profit organizations in northern India, particularly those who work to address gaps in the country’s educational infrastructures, and to improve women’s access to education. Ms. Durrani is interested in the intersections between political conflict and gender disparities, and the ways that political violence often disproportionately infringe upon women’s freedoms and rights, in India, and globally. After her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Durrani hopes to attend graduate school for further her studies in Public Policy and Government, continuing to build upon her academic interests.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Durrani is investigating the effects of COVID-19 on India’s education systems, examining how the pandemic has exacerbated gender disparities in the realm of educational access, particularly within regions of India which have historically experienced political violence or instability. Ms. Durrani is working with the Observer Research Foundation as well as a number of education-focused non-profit organizations to write a series of proposals to inform future policy with regard to educational access.

Anagha Kikkeri

Anagha Kikkeri has a passion for education, community engagement, and public service. At the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, Anagha was the first woman of Indian descent to be elected as the student body president; she graduated from UT as a Distinguished Scholar in the liberal arts honors program in May 2021.

During her undergraduate years, Anagha garnered numerous honors, fellowships, scholarships, and awards. She was recognized as the Outstanding Senior of the Class of 2021 and was also selected to be part of the Dean’s Dozen by the Office of the Dean of Students. In 2020, she received the prestigious Hyperion Award for her exceptional contributions to the university community. Anagha was inducted into Pi Sigma Alpha and also became a member of the Order of Omega.

Anagha actively engages in extracurricular and community activities. She was a member of the LBJ Women’s Campaign School. She has held positions of leadership, such as the chairwoman of the Auditing Committee for the Texas State Society and the vice president of Diversity and Inclusion for the Texas University Panhellenic Council. Notably, Anagha delivered a commencement address to an audience of over 30,000 people at UT in 2021. She also performed a personal narrative of her life experiences as a woman in the show “Amplify”.

In terms of professional experience, Anagha has made significant contributions to the political arena. She worked as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion associate and also served as a Mobilization Program coordinator at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington, D.C. Besides, she has served as a healthcare staff assistant to Senator Dianne Feinstein, thereby connecting with upwards of two million Californians.

Anagha’s other interests include boxing, painting, the Spanish language, mehndi, South Asian history, basketball, piano, and Frida Kahlo’s art.

Anagha’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is studying what young, urban, university-attending women believe about how they can break the glass ceiling in politics. For this, she is examining the structural causes behind the “glass ceiling”, the levels of political awareness, and the pathways forward for young Indian women. In this context, she is conducting interviews with women from diverse backgrounds. The project is significant because its results can help empower young women to shatter the glass ceiling.

Jennifer John Britto

Jennifer Britto is from Alpharetta, Georgia. She graduated from the University of Georgia with a double major in biochemistry and molecular biology, and women’s studies in the spring of 2023. Her passion for reproductive justice and women’s health led her to be a part of the Athens Reproductive Justice Collective Fellowship where she got the opportunity to work with local commissioners and do policy proposals. She is currently in the process of getting her paper, “The Significance of Researcher Positionality throughout the Research Process”, published in The Classics Journal. Courtesy her fellowship in the Public Service and Outreach Student Scholars Program, she has learnt to explore and engage with the Athens community. Due to this immersive involvement with the community, she won the Senior Leadership of Excellence Award in her women’s studies major. She hopes that the present Fulbright research project will support her in her aspiration to become a gynecologist and give her a global perspective on health inequity.

The Indian state of Tamil Nadu has vastly improved in increasing menstrual resource access to its population, which is reflected in its high ranking in the health index. However, the health of its population varies across regions, indicating that the intersectionality of factors like location, socioeconomic status, and gender creates discrepancies in access to resources like menstrual health education. For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Jennifer is conducting interviews with adolescent girls of marginalized communities in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli and Virudhunagar districts to develop an understanding of how disproportionate access to resources and the sway of social taboos shape their perceptions of menstruation. The interviews are also being analyzed thematically.

Kaya Mallick

Kaya Mallick is an anthropologist of religion who studies the interrelation between yoga and gender. She holds an MA in South Asia studies from the University of Washington, where she was a two-time Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow in Hindi/ Urdu. She is also a 200-hour Registered Yoga Teacher (200-RYT) and creator of The Woke Yogi, a yoga lifestyle blog. Kaya’s scholarship largely centers around female practitioners of the Hindu ascetic traditions of yoga and tantra, but she is also currently researching the role of yoga in hyper-masculine nationalist iconographies.

Kaya is a devout scholar, teacher, and practitioner of yoga who spends much of her free time on her mat. She has been teaching vinyasa and yin-style yoga for six years, and her classes seek to integrate the psychosomatic practice of modern postural yoga with the tradition’s rich philosophical lineage.

Before discovering yoga, Kaya was primarily a playwright whose plays were staged across the U.S. and India. While earning her BFA, she discovered an inherent theatricality in the Hindu mythological texts and thus she began weaving their tales into her own. The resulting research ultimately inspired her transition from dramaturgy to sociocultural anthropology. However, despite her disciplinary shift, Kaya continues to tell stories – on the stage and in the yoga studio.

With the Fulbright-Nehru research grant, Kaya is conducting an ethnography of Hindu women who lead ascetic lifestyles (sādhvīs/saṃnyāsasinīs/yoginīs). Through participant observations and interviews, she is studying how and why Hindu women practice asceticism in uniquely gendered ways and how their ascetic practices impact their lives both materially and metaphysically.

Ashwini Tambe

Dr. Ashwini Tambe is professor of history and director of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at George Washington University. She is a scholar of gender and law in South Asia and of transnational feminist theory. Over the past two decades, she has written about how South Asian societies regulate sexual practices. Her 2009 book, Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (University of Minnesota Press), traces how law-making and law-enforcement practices shaped the rise of the city’s red-light district. Her 2019 book, Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational Approach to Sexual Maturity Laws (University of Illinois Press), examines the legal paradoxes in age standards for girls’ sexual consent in India. She has also published the co-edited volumes, Transnational Feminist Itineraries (with Millie Thayer) and The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia (with Harald Fischer-Tiné). Her most recent journal articles have appeared in Feminist Formations, American Historical Review, and South Asia. She is also the editorial director of Feminist Studies, the oldest U.S. journal of feminist interdisciplinary scholarship.

Dr. Tambe holds a PhD in international relations from American University, Washington, D.C., and has taught at the University of Maryland and the University of Toronto. She has supervised doctoral dissertations on a wide range of topics, including the history of women’s studies; sports and gender; and religion and sexuality. In 2018, she received the Graduate Mentor of the Year Award from the University of Maryland.

Dr. Tambe’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring feminist debates on appropriate punishment for sexual harm, with a focus on the impact of digital activism. This is an important time in India to pose questions about such punishment since a new legal code, Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, recently replaced the Indian Penal Code. At this time of intense deliberation over regulating gender justice, Dr. Tambe is based in a premier legal education site, the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), researching cases of digital retribution, defamation lawsuits, and caste barriers to seeking justice in cases of sexual violence.

Mary (Dyan) McGuire

Dr. Mary (Dyan) McGuire is the director of the criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) programs at Saint Louis University (SLU). She also founded and directs the CCJ BA and JD program at SLU. She holds a JD from the Georgetown University Law Center and a PhD in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Prior to entering academia, she worked as a judicial clerk for the first female justice of the Missouri Supreme Court. She has also worked as an assistant attorney general for the State of Missouri and as an associate with Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal.

Dr. McGuire is a committed educator. She has received numerous teaching prizes, including the Emerson Excellence in Teaching Award and was recently named the Reichmann Professor for Excellence in Teaching at SLU. She has been spearheading efforts at inclusive, multicultural education at SLU and has developed a number of classes on the subject, including “Multiculturalism for CJ Professionals”. Her research interests involve the intersection of law and practice, systemic race and gender bias as well as violence that impacts women. Her work has been published extensively in peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of Criminal Justice and Law, Gender Issues, and Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health.

Dr. McGuire’s Fulbright-Nehru project is designed to expand students’ understanding of the problem of gender bias as manifested in social structures like the legal system and social arrangements like patriarchy and how these circumstances facilitate acts of violence and oppression against women and girls. As part of the project, she is teaching three classes at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata: “Women’s Rights and International Law”; Understanding Serial Killers through Criminology”; and “Violence Against Women”. All three classes focus on gender equity, violence against women, and/or the social construction of crime, and is intended to expand, especially in the context of domestic and international legal systems, her students’ understanding of social forces influencing the lived experiences of women and girls.