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Lisa Mitchell

Dr. Lisa Mitchell is professor in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in anthropology, history, and urban studies. She is the author of Hailing the State: Indian Democracy between Elections (Duke University Press, 2023, and Permanent Black, 2023) and Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Indiana University Press, 2009, and Permanent Black, 2010), which received the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities from the American Institute of Indian Studies. She is currently working on two book projects, one titled “The Government Job in India” and the second on translations of transnationally circulating political ideas, provisionally entitled, “The Multiple Genealogies of Indian Democracy: Global Intellectual History in Translation”. She received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University. Previously, she taught history at Queens College (CUNY), Bowdoin College, and the University of Washington, and anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Mellon Foundation, the European Research Council, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, and has been a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, a Mercator Visiting Fellow in Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. In 2020, she was a recipient of the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Mitchell’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the idea of the government job in the history of political imagination in modern India. Using archives from the Nizam’s state of Hyderabad and Indian constitutional debates, cinematic and literary portrayals of civil servants, and oral histories from current and former government employees, it is tracing historical efforts to redistribute employment opportunities, create a new middle class, and offer guaranteed employment as a form of social welfare. Assessing India’s unique social experiments in the redistribution of opportunity, the project will culminate in a book-length anthropological history of the government job in 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.

Hashwinder Singh

Mr. Hashwinder Singh is an aspiring scholar of post-Partition Indian political thought, with a particular focus on the relationship between Nehruvianism and Punjab’s Sikhs. Having recently graduated with a Master’s in Global History from the University of Oxford, and a bachelor‘s from Georgetown University, Mr. Singh is interested in how the state balances its ideological foundations when it pushes against minorities’ ability to engage with their most authentic representation of themselves. Outside of his academic passions, Mr. Singh spends his time reading, watching films and playing basketball.

Through his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mr. Singh seeks to understand the connectivity in discourse between three major periods of Sikh political agitation. Specifically, he is curious about the extent to which there was a coherence in the political rhetoric between Tara Singh (1945-46), Fateh Singh (1962-66) and Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1980-84). He wants to understand the perceived shortcomings in Congress governance that led Akali Sikhs to believe that they were being neglected. Were Khalistani’s claims of Congress hegemony inherent to the Nehruvian project? Did Sikhs fulfill a social role akin to the Muslim subaltern in the post-Partition nation-state? In sum, Mr. Singh is probing what constitutes belonging within the Nehruvian nation-state.

Mahishan Gnanaseharan

Mr. Mahishan Gnanaseharan is a burgeoning scholar whose primary research interests lie at the intersection of modern intellectual history, legal philosophy, international relations theory, and global histories of decolonization during the 20th century. He has worked and studied in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Mr. Gnanaseharan graduated from Princeton University in 2020 with a concentration in Political Theory and minors in South Asian Studies and African American Studies. At Princeton, Mr. Gnanaseharan was awarded a Streicker International Fellowship in 2019 to travel to New Delhi and collaborate with scholars at the Centre for Policy Research on research regarding liberalism and secularism in Indian jurisprudence. Mr. Gnanaseharan has also been credited for contributions to Princeton faculty research ranging from analyses of the role of slavery in the founding of the United States to assessments of major political treatises on colonialism, historic injustice, and empire.

Upon graduation, Mr. Gnanaseharan contributed for a brief time to multimillion-dollar litigation efforts as a paralegal at a New York City law firm. Shortly thereafter, he became an MSc candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics. Mr. Gnanaseharan’s postgraduate research has examined how the sizable migration of Tamil laborers from India to Ceylon in the early 20th century informed postcolonial conceptions of international borders and citizenship in South Asia.

Alongside from his research pursuits, Mr. Gnanaseharan is a passionate advocate for global human rights. He has raised concerns about violence against women and girls and the plight of refugees in South Asia before the United States Senate, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the House of Commons in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Gnanaseharan’s Fulbright-Nehru research project maps the political legacies of South India’s ‘Self-Respect’ Movement by highlighting founder E.V. Ramaswamy’s (or ‘Periyar’s’) underexplored intellectual relationships with, among others, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Using his fluency in Tamil, Mr. Gnanaseharan is analyzing the heretofore untranslated writings of Periyar to contextualize the Self-Respect Movement’s historical implications for religious pluralism, democratic politics, and Indian civic identity. Ultimately, this project has the potential to directly inform contemporary public discourse regarding political relationships between South Asian citizens of differing social backgrounds.

Christopher Chacon

Mr. Christopher Leo Chacon is a sixth year History PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and works on early twentieth century Hindu political thought under his doctoral advisor, Dr. Vinayak Chaturvedi. Specifically, he is interested in how Hindu anticolonialism and intellectualism fostered innovative conceptions of history and social reform during the last decades of colonial India as well as for the global Indian community. He is a California State University Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program scholar and has received numerous awards for writing and research. He was an AIIS Language fellow in 2018-2019 and studied Hindi in Jaipur, India. He was also the 2016 Southern California Regional Conference of Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society Best Graduate Paper Award recipient for their world history category.

Mr. Chacon enjoys facilitating discussions on history as a Teaching Assistant, a position he has held since 2017. While at UCI, he has guest lectured on topics ranging from ancient world history to Indian religions. A native of Orange County, he received his bachelor’s degree in Anthropology, History, and Religious Studies and his master’s degree in History from California State University, Fullerton in 2013 and 2016 respectively. While speaking on behalf of his graduating class in 2013, Mr. Chacon underscored his belief in a holistic approach to the humanities as well as dedicated himself to mentoring future young scholars as he began his graduate career. He has kept that promise by pursuing several certificate programs at his university centered on mentorship and currently leads a writing group for his department. Mr. Chacon will graduate in 2023 and, after completing his Mellon postdoctoral teaching appointment at UCI, pursue a career in either academics or the federal government. He will be the first in his family to receive a PhD. In his spare time, he enjoys watching films and bowling with family and friends.

Mr. Chacon’s Fulbright-Nehru project is an investigation into the transnational works of Lajpat Rai and Bhai Parmanand in order to reconstruct of one of the most consequential and influential sociopolitical movements of the 20th century—Hindu intellectualism. Through the lens of the relatively new and innovative field of global intellectual history, Mr. Chacon focuses on the writings of Parmanand and Rai so as to argue that their ideas were essential to the development of global Hindu intellectualism. Mr. Chacon has compiled evidence that strongly suggests their transnational experiences shaped Hindu intellectualism, which in turn contributed to worldbuilding before and after independence.

Sumathi Ramaswamy

Prof. Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Professor of History, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. She has published extensively on language politics, gender studies, spatial studies and the history of cartography, visual studies and the modern history of art, and more recently, digital humanities and the history of philanthropy in modern India. She holds a master’s degree in History and MPhil in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; a Master’s in Anthropology from University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in History from the University of California (Berkeley). Prior to her appointment at Duke Univeristy, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Between 2002 and 2005, she also worked for the Ford Foundation in New Delhi as Program Officer for Education, Arts and Culture. Her monographs include Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India (1997); The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (2004); The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (2010), Husain’s Raj: Postcolonial Visions of Empire and Nation (2016); and Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (2017). She is a co-founder of Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture. Her most recent works are Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience (New Delhi: Roli Books), a digital project on children’s art titled B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child in Modern India, and a co-edited volume (with Monica Juneja) titled Motherland: Pushpamala N.’s Woman and Nation (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2022). She is currently working on a new project on educational philanthropy in British India.

Focusing on India’s first educational trust named Pachaiyappa’s Charities and on its connection to the man after whom it is named, Pachaiyappa Mudaliar (d. 1794), Prof. Ramaswamy’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to chart the birth of educational philanthropy in nineteenth-century Tamil India. She analyzes the emergence of secular education as a desirable public good; the transformation in the age of colonial capital of ancestral ideas about virtuous giving; and the political, economic, and ethical motivations for philanthropic support for secular education. She also considers questions endemic to philanthropy about power and personal influence as she delineates the role of private wealth in underwriting public education.

Mark Balmforth

Dr. Mark Balmforth is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. His work analyses inherited inequality in histories of encounter between South Asians, Europeans, and Americans. His first book project, titled “Schooling the Master: Caste Supremacy and American Education in British Ceylon,” charts the entwining of caste, nation, and gender in American missionary schools in Ceylon and was awarded the History of Education Society’s 2021 Claude A. Eggertsen Prize. Dr. Balmforth’s second major research project, tentatively titled “Buried Legacies: Slavery and Caste in the Indian Ocean,” rethinks connections between enslavement, caste, and migration in the Indian Ocean by tracing the 300-year odyssey of an oppressed-caste Tamil community from the 17th to the 20th centuries. His work has been published in the History of Education Quarterly, Review of Development & Change, CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, and the International Journal of Asian Christianity.

Legacies of slavery shape conversations around the world about contemporary social and economic injustice. Over the last decade, scholars of South Asia have started to consider slavery’s impact on contemporary lives in the subcontinent, countering the dominant public and scholarly reliance upon terms like “bonded labor” or “agrestic servitude.” Contributing to the ongoing global conversation about slavery’s legacy, Dr. Balmforth’s Fulbright-Nehru project asks: what can the history of Dalit dye root-digging communities in India reveal about the intertwined careers of slavery and caste in South Asia?

Zachary Clark

Zachary Clark is a PhD candidate at Pennsylvania State University studying Late Qing and 20th-century Sino-Tibetan borderland history. Zachary received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Connecticut and then lived for over two years in Beijing, teaching English. He received his MA in Asia-Pacific studies from the University of San Francisco where he also worked at the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History. In the past two years, Zachary has been actively studying Chinese and Tibetan languages to gain a more nuanced and historical understanding of the ethnic and cultural diversity in China’s western regions.

Zachary’s research has its spotlight on the Sino-Tibetan borderland (today’s Tibet Autonomous Region, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan) from the Late Qing dynasty to the early 1950s. Within this region, he focuses on regional governance, sometimes designated as “warlordism”, which lasted for decades and navigated the governance of an ethnically diverse population of Tibetan, Han Chinese, Yi, and Hui Muslims amongst a radically shifting political landscape in both China and Tibet. His research bridges 20th-century Chinese and Tibetan history by foregrounding the interests, cultures, and ethnic groups prevalent in this borderland to better understand the early developments of nationalism, ethnicity, and identity outside of the central Chinese state.

In his free time, Zachary is a Premier League soccer enthusiast. He also enjoys hiking, watching Chinese and Tibetan films, and trying new Tibetan food recipes.

Zachary’s Fulbright-Hays project looks at the Sino-Tibetan region from 1905 to 1955, by focusing on three western provincial and regional capitals: Xining, Kangding, and Kunming. For this, he is using Chinese, English, and Tibetan sources to provide a more holistic, non-state view of the methods that regional government policies enacted on the periphery and the various Tibetan ethnic, political, and religious factors which shaped them. Zachary’s project argues that China’s far west, far from being politically irrelevant to the Chinese state, put forward new visons of modern state-making which shed light on the historical process of China’s transition from empire to nation state.

Anmol Ghavri

Anmol Ghavri is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a 2023-2024 US Fulbright-Nehru Scholar affiliated with the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU. He focuses on the history of modern South Asia as well as global histories of capitalism, political economy, and economic life. He is especially interested in the history of India’s modern market economy and society. At Michigan he has been an instructor in courses covering all periods of South Asian history. His Fulbright and doctoral research is on the history of vernacular capitalism and enterprise of agrarian communities in north India adapting to the uneven economic transformations of the twentieth century. It seeks to pluralize our understanding of the lineage of capitalism and the institutions, contradictions, and contestations characteristic of modern India’s economy. He received his BA in History from Dartmouth College with High Honors in 2018 and master’s degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics in 2020.