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Niveditha Senthilvel

Niveditha Senthilvel is a doctoral candidate in South Asian history at Boston University. She is an accomplished scholar whose academic interests lie at the intersection of environment, indigeneity, and security/criminalization. She is passionate about interrogating the parallel processes of state enclosure upon Indigenous peoples and the environments they steward, starting from the nineteenth century.

Prior to being a 2026–2027 Fulbright-Nehru Scholar, Niveditha was awarded the North American Conference on British Studies’ pre-dissertation fellowship in 2025 for her work on exploring the usage of the word “tribe” in the South Asian context. As an undergraduate, her senior capstone thesis on U.S. intervention in the 1943 Bengal Famine won the Jesse Fant Evans Prize for Best Senior Thesis from the George Washington University. Between her undergraduate and graduate careers, she worked across the government, nonprofit, and private sectors applying her research skills to the most compelling strategic challenges facing the world.

Between 1871 and 1949, hundreds of communities throughout South Asia were categorized as “criminal tribes” by the British Indian government, and they were surveilled and forcibly transferred to “reform settlements.” Niveditha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is documenting this history of forced settlement and “reform” policies targeting Indigenous populations across South Asia, with a particular focus on such settlements and residential schools in the Madras Presidency in southern India. Through this study, she hopes to contribute to the global conversation on the rights of Indigenous peoples, environmental degradation, and the responsibilities of contemporary governments in confronting histories of injustice.

Aden Cicourel

Aden Cicourel is a recent graduate of Pomona College, where he studied Middle Eastern and South Asian history. His work examines historical relationships between sound, music, and modernity. In 2025, he received the Humanities Studio Fellowship, which supported archival research in London and Mumbai for his senior thesis on jazz music in colonial Bombay. Beyond his studies, Aden played guitar in the Pomona College Jazz Ensemble, taught volunteer music lessons through the Draper Center for Community Partnerships, and helped lead the Musicians’ Coalition.

Aden’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the intertwined history of jazz and Hindustani music in the middle of the 20th century. Following India’s Independence, the increase in urbanization, proliferation of acoustic technologies, and the formation of national identity created new musical spaces for cultural exchange and connection between India and the U.S. Relying on archival research, photographs, radio broadcasts, vinyl records, oral histories, literary accounts, and concert footage, the project is uncovering how fusion genres such as raga jazz and Indo-jazz emerged from this period as nuanced symbols of fluid cosmopolitanism and national pride.

Sudev Sheth

Dr. Sudev Sheth is a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Lauder Institute at the Wharton School. His research and teaching sit at the intersection of economic history, urban studies, and global business, with a particular focus on South Asia.

He received his PhD in history and South Asia studies from the University of Pennsylvania, following an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University and undergraduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Penn, he was the Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in Business History at Harvard Business School.

Dr. Sheth is the author of Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (Cambridge University Press, 2024), which examines how merchant families shaped political authority during a period of imperial decline. His broader body of work explores the role of business actors in shaping institutions, governance, and social life across time. His research has appeared in leading journals such as Business History Review, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, and Manuscript Studies. He has also written for public-facing platforms such as Scroll and the Wire.

At Penn, Dr. Sheth teaches courses such as “Global Business through the Humanities” and “The City Paradox: Design, Innovation, and Leadership”, which examine how ideas, markets, and institutions have shaped the modern world. His teaching has been recognized for its interdisciplinary approach and engagement with global perspectives.

Dr. Sheth’s Fulbright-Nehru project, “Ahmedabad’s Architects: Merchant Capitalism and Shaping a City across Seven Centuries”, is investigating how business communities have shaped urban development, governance, and architecture in one of India’s most dynamic cities. Drawing on archival research, oral histories, and analysis of the built environment, the project is tracing how business families developed institutions for credit, governance, and civic life which linked the city of Ahmedabad to regional and global networks. By foregrounding business-led forms of urban transformation, the study is attempting to offer new perspectives on capitalism, development, and the relationship between economic power and civic authority.

Gita Pai

Dr. Gita Pai is a professor of history and the director of the International & Global Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UWL). Since joining the UWL faculty in 2010 after her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, she has specialized as a cultural historian of early modern to modern South Asia, focusing on south-eastern India (present-day Tamil Nadu). Her research, supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, the American Association of University Women, and UWL Faculty Research Grants, culminated in her first book, Architecture of Sovereignty: Stone Bodies, Colonial Gazes, and Living Gods in South India (Cambridge University Press, 2023). This work traces the historical transformations of a prominent temple site in Madurai through the lenses of architecture, sovereignty, visual culture, ritual practice, gender, and cultural tourism.

During her current Fulbright-Nehru tenure, Dr. Pai is advancing her book-in-progress, In Pursuit of Dancing Śiva: The History of India’s Iconic Cultural Treasure. Her research is examining the journey of Śiva Naṭarāja (Lord of Dance), a pinnacle of South Asian sculpture, from being a medieval Tamil devotional object to a centerpiece of contemporary restitution disputes. The project is also analyzing the icon’s evolution into a global symbol of Indian and Hindu identity. Dr. Pai is a past recipient of fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Fulbright-Nehru Program.

Hayden Bellenoit

Dr. Hayden Bellenoit is a professor of history at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. He is a legal and social historian of modern South Asia. His research focuses on colonial state formation, the histories of scribal communities, and the broader impact of colonial legal systems upon Indian social, religious, and cultural traditions. Dr. Bellenoit received his MA from Wheaton College and his DPhil in modern history from Oxford University. At the Naval Academy, he teaches courses on modern India and Pakistan. He has also been a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, where he is a life member.

Dr. Bellenoit is the author of two books: Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860–1920 (2007); and The Formation of the Colonial State in India: Scribes, Paper and Taxes, 1760–1860 (2017). His articles have appeared in top peer-reviewed academic journals such as Modern Asian Studies, Law and History Review, South Asian History and Culture, and Indian Law Review. He is currently completing an article on how Mughal-era legal customs were read into the codification of Hindu property law and inheritance.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Bellenoit is conducting research for his third book, “Judges, Case Law and Jurisprudence: The Legal Construction of Caste in India, c. 1830–1950”. This will be the first book to fully address the question of modern constructions of caste/social hierarchy in India as a result of the broader phenomena of colonial law. It will carefully examine how colonial case law, the training of Indian judges and lawyers, and the resultant jurisprudence, all broadly combined to shape modern understandings about the relationship between caste and law.

Emilie Raymer

Dr. Emilie Raymer teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program and holds a doctorate in the history of science and technology from Johns Hopkins University. Her teaching and scholarly interests include life and human sciences, environmental history and ecology, the philosophy of science, and the relationships among, art, science, and literature. She is a recipient of the Anya Bernstein Bassett Award for Excellence in Teaching by Non-Ladder Faculty from Harvard University; the Certificate of Teaching Excellence from Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education every semester that it was awarded during her tenure; and the Dean’s Commendation for Distinguished Teaching Performance for her work at the Harvard Extension School, where she taught both writing and introduction to graduate studies in biology. She is also a recipient of the Arthur J. Quinn Memorial Fellowship from the Bancroft Library; an Alfred M. Landon Research Grant; and a junior fellowship from the Library of Congress. She has also served as a Eugene Garfield Fellow at the American Philosophical Society; a senior visiting fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research; a fellow in values engagement in Harvard’s Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics; and as a visiting scholar in the University of Cambridge’s Department of the History and Philosophy of Science.

Dr. Raymer’s Fulbright-Nehru project is highlighting India’s pivotal contributions to global human ecology by centering on the social scientist Radhakamal Mukerjee and contemporary environmental scholars who moved research away from hierarchical and utilitarian interpretations of the biophysical environment toward an emphasis on entanglement, reciprocity, and regional specificity. The project is conducting archival research to examine how ecological ideas circulated internationally, and how ethical, political, and methodological commitments shaped environmental knowledge.

Pirawat Punyagupta

Putt Punyagupta graduated from Yale University with a BA in history and South Asian studies. A two-time U.S. State Department critical language scholar, he is proficient in Chinese, Hindi, Lao, Persian, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Tamil, Thai, and Urdu, and is presently learning Bengali and Russian. He has worked for Yale’s Program in Iranian Studies as well as the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. He has also conducted research for the Stimson Center, a U.S. nonprofit that aims to enhance international peace and security through analysis and outreach. Besides, he has taken part in symposia at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies. Putt has also supported heritage conservation activities. Prior to Fulbright, he was an open-source analyst in Washington, D.C.

Putt’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the history of delimitation in India. It is investigating the process’ original design elements while examining the intentions of past delimitation commissions and their attempts to ensure neutrality. It is also studying the responses of political parties and rationales behind the federal- and state-level freezes that took place in 1971 and 2002. The project is primarily relying on archival materials housed in Delhi, but is also consulting collections in relevant regional centers such as Chennai and Mumbai. Overall, the project aims to shed light on the underlying architecture that sustains India’s vibrant democracy.

Cecilia Giancola

Cecilia Giancola is a graduate of Bard College, where she majored in historical studies and minored in economics. She has worked as a research assistant to Professor Karen Barkey, a historical sociologist of empires, with whom she has co-authored a forthcoming chapter on states and empires for the Encyclopedia of Global Social Theory. Through Bard College’s senior-to-senior grant, Cecilia conducted archival research at the British Library in London in January 2025, which contributed to her senior project, a thesis-length work entitled “‘An Engagement of Extraordinary Nature:’ Baroda, the Bankers’ Army, and the British Bahendari, 1800–1833”. The project won the Marc Bloch Prize for the best Senior Project in History. Cecilia is also a recipient of Bard’s Li-hua Ying Fund for Asian Studies. In her junior year, she had won the Margaret and John Bard award for excellence in social studies.

Cecilia is interested in the processes of state formation and consolidation, with special attention on colonial states. This led Cecilia to explore the British East India Company, a corporation which managed the first century of British colonial rule in India. She is particularly interested in how Indian bankers and other financial agents clashed (and meshed) with the Company in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her other interests include the political and social mechanisms of debt in India, the role of tax revenues in facilitating the drain of wealth from India, and the social culture of India’s early colonial society.

Cecilia’s Fulbright-Nehru project is conducting archival research focusing on the operations of the Baroda (Gaikwad) state in western India during the 19th century, narrowing in on its interactions with the British Raj under the context of “smuggling” and illicit trade policies. Specifically, she is examining the role of the Malwa opium trade, an indigenously controlled trade which rivaled the East India Company’s Bengal opium monopoly. Cecilia is exploring to what extent opium trade and “smuggling” was utilized by the British as a pretext for the expansion of the colonial state and the elimination of powerful indigenous capital in Baroda and western India.

Rebecca Waxman

Ms. Rebecca Waxman is a PhD candidate at UCLA in the Department of History, specializing in South Asia and with a concentration in gender studies. Her work aims to study occurrences of sexual and gender-based violence that marked turning-point moments in colonial and postcolonial Indian social, political, and feminist histories. Ms. Waxman received her BA in history with a certificate in South Asian Studies from Wesleyan University in 2016, where she wrote her honors thesis historicizing the Delhi Gang Rape of 2012. Her work has been published in Women’s History Review and A Cultural Encyclopedia of Lost Cities and Civilizations (forthcoming).

Ms. Waxman’s dissertation project historicizes the relationship between the interpersonal, violent act of rape and the broader Indian society and politics, exploring how colonial categories and dynamics shaped understandings and legislation of female sexuality and of sexualized violence in British and independent India. It also studies the continuities and discontinuities between colonial and postcolonial India regarding rape. Ms. Waxman’s research endeavors to illuminate key nodes in the complex heterogeneous history of sexual violence in modern South Asia in order to recuperate the subjecthood of Indian women who enter the archive in moments of violation; it also aims to question the dominant knowledge structures informing the subjugation of women.