Field of Study USA: Writing

Pritha RaySircar

Pritha RaySircar is a writer, poet, audio documentarian, community worker, and an artist. She uses sound, words, cartoon, collage, fiber, and food performance to tell stories of (de)colonization, economics, identity, and immigration. Her current projects use family caregiving, menopause, and spinsterhood as lenses to interrogate allowed and conventional South Asian-American stereotypes. An Aspen Words Fellow, an AIR New Voices Fellow, and a holder of the Harpur Palate Award for Creative Nonfiction, Pritha is a current MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the NYU Creative Writing Program, a poet at the Poetry Project, and studies short fiction with writer George Saunders alongside a worldwide cohort via Substack. She holds a postgraduate certificate in radio, podcasting, and audio documentary from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies; an MS in public policy from the Milano School for Public Engagement/Urban Policy at the New School for Social Research as a full merit scholar; and a BA in English literature from Barnard College, Columbia University.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Pritha is researching and documenting oral histories of sraddha habishyanno – mourning food recipes and rituals – in Kolkata, West Bengal, to create a cultural process archive for diasporic Bengalis. No such centralized, easily understood, engaging layperson documentation exists. As a writer, documentarian, and social practice artist, Pritha is preserving the habishyanno practice in audio, text and text translation, image, and video as a legacy conveyance and to spark future user-friendly diasporic artefacts. An audio documentary, multimedia installation, and spoken-word performance are also in the works. Apart from these productions, Pritha’s research is set to shape and inform an American anthology book project on hospice and mourning comfort food and ritual.

Jamie Barber

Prof. Jamie Barber holds a position in the academic and professional writing program at the University at Buffalo where she also served as the interim director of the Journalism Certificate Program in 2021-2022. Prof. Barber’s work in the classroom aims to decenter concepts of “normal” in order to invite students to leverage their diverse backgrounds and abilities as they develop their writing skills. She recently taught a class titled “Writing for Change” in which students learned research and writing skills while trying to enact change on a real-world problem that intersected with their interests and identities. These writing students extended the impact of their writing and learning by creating multimodal “campaigns” to get the word out about their change-making ideas. Students created activist-centered zines, podcasts, infographics, and other documents that extended beyond text-based communication. Prof. Barber is currently co-designing a first-year writing course in which students will explore their language backgrounds while speculating on what linguistic justice might look like in academic and professional writing contexts.

Prof. Barber’s creative work often focuses on interactions between humans and the more-than-human world. Her essay “The Trouble with Cockroaches” explores tension between a “do-no-harm” attitude and a cockroach infestation. Her essay “Accepting Impermanence” speculates that ancient people may have advice for a new mother. Prof. Barber is also developing her journalism portfolio, recently writing about earthquake research for Temblor, and about the Buffalo, NY community for Buffalo Rising.

Prof. Barber’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks to build a collaborative framework between students, educators, artists, designers, and scientists. She plans to work with the Science Gallery Bengaluru, an institution already engaged in powerful connections between the arts and the sciences, to build workshops that will connect students to this collaborative framework. Students will learn science while they engage in multimodal science communication projects.

Liesl Schwabe

Ms. Liesl Schwabe is a writer and educator. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, and LitHub. She was awarded the 2020 Donald Murray Prize and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Ms. Schwabe has been a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar and was a scholar associate at the Institute of Language Studies and Research Kolkata, where she facilitated writing workshops for the faculty and graduate students. In 2024, she was named an English Language Specialist by the U.S. Department of State. Formerly the director of the Writing Program at Yeshiva College, she currently oversees the Writing Center and the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Berkshire Community College. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

The teaching portion of Ms. Schwabe’s Fulbright-Nehru project involves setting up writing workshops for undergraduate and graduate students; it is also working on the professional development of the faculty interested in integrating more writing instruction into their classes. For the research portion of this project, she is writing a collection of essays that explore specific instances of U.S. and Indian interactions – artistic, environmental, and social. The cornerstone essay is focusing on the play, Maanusher Adhikare (The Rights of Man), written and performed in Bengali in 1968, which is on the 1930s trials of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama. Blending personal narrative, historical context, and contemporary reporting, the collection is about the limitations and possibilities of solidarity, while illuminating upon interdependence and shared humanity.

Ultimately, Ms. Schwabe hopes to establish a writing and research center in Kolkata which will serve as a resource for a consortium of public universities, with its workshops and one-on-one support for student and faculty, along with research and publication. She believes that writing centers help foster curiosity and exchange of ideas, on the page, around the campus, and in the world.