University of Delhi Archives

Sheryl Alexander

Ms. Sheryl Alexander earned her master’s degree in English literature from the University of Delhi in 2023, after completing her bachelor’s degree from St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi. In addition, she completed another master’s degree in Migration and Diaspora Studies from Indira Gandhi National Open University in 2025. She has worked as a lecturer in the Department of English at St. Xavier’s College, Jaipur, where she taught undergraduate courses in Romantic and pre-Romantic poetry, Indian writing in English, and foundation English language studies.

Her research interests lie at the intersection of memory studies, migrant diasporas, and minority studies, with published works on literary hauntology, diasporic identities, and cultural memory. She has been a research intern at the Centre for Memory Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. She has also contributed to the Indian Network for Memory Studies, in addition to presenting papers at national and international conferences. Beyond teaching at a university, she has volunteered with Dalit and migrant communities in Jaipur, where she explored inclusive and interactive language pedagogy.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Sheryl is a primary instructor of Hindi at the University of Kansas. She is also involved in curriculum designing and developing learning resources for the language program. She hopes to utilize her Fulbright experience to foster cross-cultural dialogue by integrating her research insights on literature, memory studies, and diaspora narratives into language instruction to create a holistic learning experience. She aims to enrich her pedagogical practices with intercultural perspectives to bring back to her classroom in India and contribute to building meaningful academic exchange between India and the United States.

Oishi Choudhury

Ms. Oishi Choudhury is a PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi. She qualified for the University Grants Commission (UGC) NET-JRF (Junior Research Fellow) in 2022 and began her doctoral journey in 2023. She completed her master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Delhi, specializing in biological anthropology with a focus on epidemiology and public health.

Oishi has published a book chapter and a manuscript revolving around biological anthropology and public health. Her research interest extends to molecular anthropology. Her doctoral research aims at screening, awareness, and counselling of beta thalassemia trait among young adults in Delhi-NCR India.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at University of California San Francisco, Oishi is conducting a comparative study on thalassemia carrier screening and genetic counselling protocols in India and the US. Oishi is enhancing her expertise in advanced screening techniques for diagnosing thalassemia trait in the U.S. As part of her research, she will work at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, home to one of the largest thalassemia programs in the U.S.

Chandrika Konwar

Ms. Chandrika Konwar is a Ph.D. scholar at the Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Center for Biomedical Research (ACBR), University of Delhi, Delhi. Her Ph.D. project explores the impact of gene regulation on cell death and aging which includes extensive experimentation with Caenorhabditis elegans (a nematode worm), molecular biology, microscopy and proteomics in parallel with big data and systems biology.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Konwar is studying the role of SIN3 in cancer by using C. elegans as the model system. This is expected to add new knowledge on cancer development and diagnosis and will help create the prospect of using the nematode as a disease model to elucidate the cellular and molecular markers underpinning tumorigenesis.

Prior to her Ph.D., she completed her B.Sc. (Biochemistry) and M.Sc. (Biomedical Science) from the University of Delhi. She has worked on several research projects including but not limited to finding new drug targets and natural remedies for infectious diseases like gonorrhoea and tuberculosis. She has also done some exciting interdisciplinary research on the social connotations of health and well-being within Indian sub-populations. Most of her findings have been published in reputed peer-reviewed journals and presented in conferences.

Ms. Konwar is a firm believer in open science and interdisciplinary research, and a strong proponent of science communication, public policy and sustainability. Apart from research, she devotes her time towards developing new skills and writing creative articles for different media as well as volunteering for social causes.

Yatin Batra

Mr. Yatin Batra is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, University of Delhi, Delhi. His doctoral research is interdisciplinary in nature and focuses on the identity aspects of the Siraiki (Bahawalpuri/Multani) and Sindhi communities through the written and oral narratives of Partition (1947) migrants and eyewitnesses. His fieldwork includes recording Siraiki folk traditions and the narratives of Siraiki partition survivors dispersed across India.

Mr. Batra graduated with an honors degree in English literature from Shyam Lal College, University of Delhi. He has a master’s (with a gold medal) and an M.Phil. in Comparative Indian Literature from the University of Delhi. His areas of interest include comparative literature, partition studies, gender studies, folklore, and culture studies. He has presented papers at numerous national and international seminars on diverse topics.

Mr. Batra is a recipient of the Tata Trust – Partition Archive Research Grant (2021) at the 1947 Partition Archive based in Berkeley, CA, where he is also a certified Citizen Historian. He received the Likho Citizen Journalism Fellowship (2020) from the Humsafar Trust (NGO for LGBTQ rights). He has worked with NGOs such as Katha and Kitaab Club to impart education to underprivileged students.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Mr. Batra aims at building cross-cultural connections between Indianness and Americanness through his creative strategies of teaching language. As a cultural ambassador, he is imbibing culture in a pluralistic way through the philosophy of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.

P.K. Yasser Arafath

Dr. P.K. Yasser Arafath is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delhi and a historian of medieval and early modern India. He was L.M. Singhi Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 2017.

Dr. Arafath received his Ph.D. from the University of Hyderabad, and his research primarily focuses on South India. He is interested in its intellectual traditions, transliterated literature, history of violence, communities in the Indian Ocean, and the cultural history of the body and hygiene in the region. He has co-edited Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction (Routledge, 2021) and The Hijab: Islam, Women and the Politics of Clothing (Simon & Schuster, 2022). Dr. Arafath won the prestigious Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer Best Published Paper Award (2020–2021) for his research article that he published in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Arafath is examining how a section of South Asian Islamic scholars shaped the gender sensibilities of the Mappila-Muslims of Malabar by engaging with multiple discourses within the region and beyond in the 19th century. His project aims to do a systematic study of gender and sexuality in Arabi-Malayalam, a transliterated textual tradition in the Indian Ocean region that entails writing Malayalam —the native tongue of Kerala —in Arabic script. This study will add to the existing body of knowledge on gendered Islam in South Asia and gender discourses in South Asian Islamic cultures in the 19th century.

Ruchi Rana

Ruchi Rana is a PhD candidate at the Department of MIL & LS, University of Delhi, Delhi. She recently defended her doctoral thesis, which examines nature and ecological ethos in Uttarakhand’s folklife. She holds a master’s in English literature and an MPhil in comparative Indian literature from the University of Delhi. She has worked as a research coordinator for a project on Kazi Nazrul Islam jointly undertaken by the MIL Department (DU) and Kazi Nazrul University, West Bengal. Her research areas include folkloristics, Himalayan culture, diasporic literature, and memory studies.

Ruchi received two academic excellence awards in BA English (Honours) from Swami Shraddhanand College (DU). She is a recipient of a research fellowship for the National Mission on Cultural Mapping (NMCM) of Indian villages, a project under the Ministry of Culture, the Government of India.

Ruchi has presented papers at several national and international conferences, including the 134th annual meeting of the American Folklore Society (2022), the 14th conference of SIEF (2022), the annual conference of the Folklore Society of London (2022), and 10th International Conference of Young Folklorists (2021), organised by University of Tartu, Estonia. Her research on Uttarakhand’s Jagar ritual got published in the UGC Care-listed journal The Eastern Anthropologist in 2022.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at the University of Illinois in Chicago, Ruchi aims to fortify the bonds between India and the U.S. by promoting intercultural dialogue through Hindi language instruction. Her objectives are to broaden her teaching philosophy, develop innovative pedagogies, and foster a multicultural mindset among her students.

Naorem Kiranmala Devi

Dr. Naorem Kiranmala Devi currently serves as an Associate Professor at the University of Delhi. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Delhi.

Her research focuses on demographic and genomic variations among populations, particularly in India’s northeast region. Dr. Devi specializes in nutritional anthropology, biochemical genetics, and molecular anthropology. Through her research initiatives she has extensively explored the population specific risk factors of cardio-metabolic disorders in India along with the associated genetic and epigenetic alterations. With substantial experience in academia, she has contributed to course development, conference organization, and research administration. She has published over 40 research articles and book chapters, exploring diverse topics such as cardiovascular health, genetic polymorphisms, epigenetic studies, and socio-cultural determinants of health. Additionally, she actively engages in community service, particularly in raising awareness about health issues such as thalassemia and hypertension through outreach programs and screening camps.

Dr. Kiranmala’s Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project aims to identify and understand the implicit cultural components of the hypertension management programs in the U.S. and India, and work with local experts to explore ways to develop a culturally appropriate intervention module for the management of hypertension in high-risk communities of Punjab, India.