Eastern Connecticut State University Archives

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.

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.

William Elison

Prof. William Elison studied at Williams College and received a PhD in the history of religions from the University of Chicago. He teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in Hinduism and related traditions as observed in India in the present day, mostly in vernacular languages, mostly among non-elite people.

As an urban ethnographer, he is committed to an ongoing program of research in the streets and poor neighborhoods of Mumbai. The first book-length product of this research, The Neighborhood of Gods, came out in 2018 from the University of Chicago Press. It examines how slum residents and other marginalized groups use religious images to mark and settle urban space. One of its main arguments is that sacred space is created according to a visual and somatic praxis observed across religious traditions. At the same time, it recasts, in a modern context, a question central to the history of Hindu thought: If the divine is manifest in the phenomenal world, then where and in what form do we recognize God? And with what sort of insight or authority?

Related research interests have included Adivasi (“tribal” or ST) communities; Indian slum neighborhoods and their village roots; and the mediation of darshan, or visual worship, by the movies and other technologies. From his student days, Prof. Elison has looked to Hindi popular cinema— “Bollywood”— for a window into modern Indian culture. His book on the landmark 1977 film Amar Akbar Anthony, coauthored with Christian Novetzke and Andy Rotman, was released in 2015 by Harvard University Press.

He has recently become interested in exploring the literary possibilities of ethnographic writing. His Fulbright-Nehru project this year intends to advance the next step in his fieldwork inquiry into religious life in Mumbai slum colonies.

A multisite ethnography of religious life in Mumbai slum communities. By “slum” Prof. Elison means housing consisting of unauthorized structures. Over half Mumbai’s population lives in such neighborhoods. By “religion” he means cults of local, territorial gods and divinized figures. This is a stratum of practice long associated with “village Hinduism” that Prof. Elison will demonstrate is a) observed in urban India; and b) not confined to Hindus. He will study gods as brokers of blessings and resources that flow into communities: vitality, cash, respect. Over a total of six months, Prof. Elison seeks to pursue simultaneous inquiries in three or more neighborhoods. His method is qualitative participant observation.

Lavanya Nott

Lavanya Nott is a PhD student in geography at UCLA. She has a master’s degree in South Asia studies from Cornell University and a bachelor’s in English literature and mathematics from Bryn Mawr College. She has worked in organizing and research in the area of labor rights in both India and the U.S., most recently, with an organization in Bengaluru on the working conditions in export-oriented manufacturing industries in South India. In the past, her research has been supported by Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, and UCLA-administered grants.

Outside of research, Lavanya is an avid baker and cook, and enjoys playing football with a local club and spending time with her dog, Abacus.

Lavanya’s Fulbright research is exploring past and current projects on food sovereignty in postcolonial India and their entanglements with anti-imperialist internationalist currents across the Third World. Her study is particularly on how struggles around food sovereignty have transformed in response to neoliberalism, and how they relate to broader questions of political and economic sovereignty in the postcolonial world.

Julia Wintner

Ms. Julia Wintner is the director of the Art Gallery at Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU) in Willimantic, Connecticut, where she curates exhibitions, manages the visiting artist program, and teaches courses in curatorial practice. Previously, she was the director of the University of Central Florida Art Gallery, Orlando, where she developed a solid record of multidisciplinary curating and promoted the fine arts as a central and highly visible part of academic and cocurricular campus life. She graduated from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. Her academic studies are supported by a two decades-long immigrant journey through four continents, beginning in Russia, continuing through South East Asia and the South Pacific, and concluding in North America. Her immigrant journey inspired her interest in diasporic art making. In her curatorial work, Ms. Wintner highlights the artist’s role as a cultural ambassador of the divided contemporary world; she also focuses on the development of a constituent-based curatorial model. Her research has been presented and featured in academic conferences and publications.

Ms. Wintner’s Fulbright-Nehru project is researching contemporary curatorial practices in India and how the curator’s role there has evolved over the past 30 years. She is instructing Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology students in their curatorial MA program regarding contemporary curatorial practices within U.S. cultural institutions. Her award will result in exhibitions showcasing contemporary Indian artists, curatorial exchanges, and joint classroom sessions between her home and host institutions. The project will also contribute to creating a cohort of curators who will be intermediaries between countries, cultural policies, and diverse audiences.