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Gulfishan Khan

Prof. Gulfishan Khan is a specialist in medieval Indian history. Till June 2024, she was professor and chairperson of the Department of History at Aligarh Muslim University (India). Her most recent publication is a paper Representations of the Palace and Cityscape (co-authored with W. M. Thackston) in the annual Muqarnas (Brill: 2024). Her major academic contributions are the two books Indian Muslim Perceptions (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Indo-Persian Elite (New Delhi: Manohar, 2025).

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Prof. Gulfishan Khan would be studying some important aspects of architectural refashioning of the dynamic capital (darul khilafa) Agra, a vibrant medieval urban settlement during the first half of the Seventeenth Century. In this significant period the Mughal court at Agra was the nucleus of a splendid flowering of art and artistic culture, based on blending of Indian and Perso-Islamic traditions under the liberal court-patronage of emperor Shah Jahan. The architectural contribution of imperial women in the aestheticization of the urban landscape of the historic capital and its environs would be highlighted.

Suneetha Saggurti

Dr. Suneetha is currently an Assistant Professor in human resource management and organizational behavior at the Indian Institute of Management, Raipur. She holds a PhD in Management from XLRI-Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur and did her master’s from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Before joining academia, she spent seventeen years in human resources within the manufacturing industry. She was a Visiting Fellow at the ILR school of Cornell University from March-June 2025. She was a Fellow of International Humanistic Management Association (2024-2025).

Dr. Suneetha’s research centers on human flourishing, dignity, and well-being in organizational life, reflected in her doctoral thesis, Being Who We Are (Loving Beings) and Doing What We Know (Holding and Being Held): Reimagining Group Life and Leadership for Peace and Sustainability. Her current work explores the Ecozoic paradigm and Ecozoic leadership based on the work of Thomas Berry. Her work also focuses on micro-affirmations, the Keatsian concept of negative capability, and slowing down. She also works in critical pedagogy, examining how business education must be reimagined to confront the ecological and social crises of our time. She is trained in micro-phenomenology. She completed TECTU (Training in Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding), an interdisciplinary European Erasmus+ program.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Suneetha is aiming to develop labor metrics and auditing practices for the construction industry, drawing from the more developed practices and metrics in apparel and footwear supply chains. The study will contribute to better due diligence practices and governance in construction supply chains.

Shaifali Arora

Dr. Shaifali Arora is a scholar of colonial and postcolonial South Asian history, with a particular interest in the cultural and linguistic history of the 1947 Partition of India. Her research examines how histories of displacement are remembered, reworked, and transmitted through everyday practices, with a particular focus on Punjab.

Dr. Arora received her PhD in English from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Indore. She holds an MA and MPhil in English and a BA (Hons) in English from Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. She has also qualified the UGC-NTA NET in English. She received the Alliance of Digital Humanities Bursary Award to visit McGill University, Canada, in 2017 and the ASEM-DUO Fellowship to visit Lancaster University, UK, in 2020.

Dr. Arora’s research papers have been published in international journals such as South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (Taylor & Francis) and Contemporary South Asia (Taylor & Francis).

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Arora will document and analyze the culinary practices of refugees from regions such as Bahawalpur and Multan, focusing on how food functions as a living archive of displacement, resilience, and gendered memory. Her project is significant as South Asian Studies programs in the US are increasingly foregrounding micro-histories, gendered narratives, and diasporic memory in understanding Partition. This project will illustrate how domestic culinary practices serve as cultural repositories, particularly among women whose roles as preservers and transmitters of subregional identities through food remain critically underexplored.

Mawonthing Ngashangva

Dr Ng Mawonthing is an independent scholar whose research centers on Tangkhul proverbs as vital expressions of cultural knowledge. Her doctoral work involved the systematic documentation and analysis of these proverbs, with particular attention to their rhetorical structures, social functions, and embedded worldviews, contributing to the preservation of an endangered linguistic and cultural heritage. She earned her BA and MA in English from the English and Foreign Languages University, Shillong, and was awarded PhD by the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati in 2025.

Dr Mawonthing’s broader academic interests include paremiology, folklore studies, and digital humanities, particularly community-driven approaches to cultural preservation.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Fuller Theological Seminary, California, Dr Mawonthing is developing a bilingual dictionary of Tangkhul-English proverbs, envisioned as a resource for both scholars and the wider public, making ancestral knowledge more accessible to younger generations while fostering cross-cultural understanding and dialogue.

Malavi Srikar

Dr. Malavi Srikar is a certified speech-language pathologist and researcher specializing in early social communication and autism. She completed her BSc at the SR Chandrashekar Institute of Speech and Hearing, Bangalore (2016), followed by an MSc from the All India Institute of Speech and Hearing (AIISH), Mysore (2019). She subsequently earned her PhD in Speech-Language Pathology from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore (2025). During her professional journey, she has also served as a tele-interventionist at AIISH (2020) and was a research scientist on an ICMR-funded project at NIMHANS (2026).

Dr. Srikar’s research centers on caregiver-infant dyadic interaction and caregiver-mediated tele-interventions for infants at elevated likelihood for autism. In 2022, she was awarded a Virtual Research Internship in Autism and Cultural Diversity by the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR), collaborating with mentors from the University of Manchester to study these interactions in Indian dyads. She has received travel grants in 2024 and 2025 to present her work at the INSAR annual meetings and has published several articles in major international journals.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Srikar will examine dyadic engagement in infants at elevated likelihood for autism. During her fellowship, she will build on work pioneered by Prof. Grace Baranek to investigate the interrelationships between dyadic engagement and sensory responsivity patterns, representing the two core domains of autism, with the goal of informing early identification and intervention strategies.

Diptarup Ghosh Dastidar

Dr. Diptarup Ghosh Dastidar earned his BA (Hons) in 2014 from Serampore College, affiliated with University of Calcutta, and completed his MA in 2016 at Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Varanasi. In December 2023, he was awarded a PhD from BHU. Dr. Ghosh Dastidar was a research intern at National Institute of Technology, Trichy in July 2019, where he worked on graphic medicine.

Dr. Ghosh Dastidar’s research interests lie primarily in comics studies, spatiality, visual cultures, graphic medicine, ludology, and Indology. He has published several research articles in SCOPUS-indexed international journals such as Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (JHU Press), and The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Taylor & Francis). He has qualified for the CBSE-UGC NET examination, and was also awarded the Teach-for-BHU (TfB) Fellowship from August 2023 to July 2024. He worked as Assistant Professor at Amity University Chhattisgarh from 2020 to 2022.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Ghosh Dastidar is focusing on the nature and history of the American graphic novel with respect to the growth and development of the Indian counterpart, with special emphasis on community interactions and exploration of the American “comics world” (Beaty 2012). He is exploring the network of comics scholarship and practice in the USA and bridging it with the Indian comics network, while deliberating on establishing authority on the idea of the graphic novel as a genre.

Dr. Anand

Dr. Anand is an online urban and community forestry consultant at Fair Forests Consulting LLC, Michigan, USA specializing in urban forestry, ecosystem services, and climate resilience. He earned his MSc in natural resource management and PhD in environmental sciences from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi. His doctoral research focused on ecosystem services, carbon sequestration, and governance of urban green spaces.

Dr. Anand has worked with organizations including the USDA Forest Service and has extensive expertise in i-Tree Tools, GIS and urban ecological assessment. He has published in reputed national and international journals. He was honored with the 2025 i-Tree Innovation Award by the Urban and Community Forestry Society, USA.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Anand is collaborating on international comparative research on urban greening and large-scale tree planting initiatives. His work focuses on plantable urban space, governance, community engagement, and landscape preferences in urban forestry. Dr. Anand is also contributing as co-editor to an academic volume on urban greening.

Susmita Sur-Kolay

Dr. Susmita Sur-Kolay is a Visting Professor of Computer Science in Ashoka University. Till 2024, she was a Professor in the Advanced Computing and Microelectronics Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. Earlier, she was a Reader in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Jadavpur University, a post-doctoral fellow at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a Research Assistant at the Laboratory for Computer Science in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.

Dr Sur-Kolay’s research contributions are in algorithmic design automation for electronic and quantum circuits, fault modeling and testing, hardware security, and graph algorithms. She has co-authored several papers in international journals and refereed conference proceedings, three book chapters, and co-edited three books.

She has served on the committees of international conferences and on the editorial board of major journals. She was a Distinguished Visitor of IEEE Computer Society (India), and is a Fellow of Indian National Science Academy and Indian National Academy of Engineering. She has received the President of India Gold Medal and Distinguished Alumnus Award at IIT Kharagpur, Women in Technology Leadership Award from VLSI Society of India and International Excellence Fellowship at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (2024).

During her tenure of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic Excellence Fellowship at UC San Diego, Dr. Sur-Kolay is aiming to design efficient methods for the layout phase of mapping quantum algorithms to the target quantum hardware with error correction capabilities and to teach related courses.

Mohammed Roshan Cheerakolil Konath

Dr. Mohammed Roshan C.K. completed his Ph.D. from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai in 2021. He completed his master’s and bachelor’s in sociology from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and the University of Calicut, Malappuram, Kerala respectively. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he explored the techniques of cultivating affective bonding with the Prophet Muhammed and the devotional world these bonds create among the Mappila Muslims of Kerala, South India.

Dr. Roshan has published in renowned academic and non-academic journals. He has presented at numerous national and international conferences. His area of interest revolves around the sociology of religion, technology, globalization and local cultures, affect studies, intellectual history of Islam, anthropology of Islam, and Islam and Muslims in South Asia.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Roshan is looking at a recent phenomenon among Mappila Muslims of South India whereby they look toward North American Muslim scholars to form an opinion on Islamic matters and shape their everyday life. The foundational assumption in this study is that this new tendency needs to be located in the ongoing surge of neo-traditional Islam in different parts of the world. The study compares neo-traditional Islam’s characters, structures, mode of knowledge production, global networking, and authorities in North America and South India, and analyzes the shared characteristics and ruptures between traditional Islam in both contexts. Dr. Roshan’s study enquires how these complex trans-local realities, mediated through the means and structure of globalization, call to reimagine the conventional boundaries between Islam and the West.

Krupa Rajangam

Dr. Krupa Rajangam is a humanities-based heritage scholar and conservation practitioner. In her research, she draws on anthropology and social geography to interpret nature-culture conservation practices, particularly the construction of socio-cultural place identities, urban-rural geographies, and tourism imaginaries. Her work is community-engaged, with a focus on public dissemination of research.

Dr. Rajangam earned her bachelor’s in architecture in 1999 from the RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru and her master’s in conservation studies in 2005 from the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies, University of York, UK. In 2020, she completed her doctorate in conservation studies at the National Institute of Advanced Studies and Manipal Academy of Higher Education.

Dr. Rajangam is the Founder-Director of a collective called “Saythu… Linking People and Heritage” and an editorial board member of the Taylor & Francis journal, Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites (CMAS). She runs an immersive field school that is driven by and teaches critical theory, experiential field-based education, and interdisciplinary methods of learning.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Rajangam is working to contribute to global debates on archaeological and heritage place-making, social geography, and social violence as outcomes of UNESCO World Heritage inscription, boundary demarcation, and management. The need for such studies is pressing urban-centric development of historic landscapes, contrary to the intent of practice and policy, is deepening social marginalization.