Harvard University Archives

Seton Uhlhorn

Seton Uhlhorn is a PhD candidate in South Asian studies at Harvard University. She received her BA with honors from the University of Texas at Austin, graduating from the rigorous Hindi-Urdu Flagship Program. Passionate about language studies, Seton works in Urdu, Hindi, and Persian. She has received numerous fellowships and grants to conduct advanced language training and archival research in India, including from the American Institute of Indian Studies and Boren Awards. Her doctoral research is on the work of the 18th-century poet and grammarian, Insha Allah Khan Insha. Currently, she serves as the teaching fellow for Hindi and Urdu and as the co-chair of the South Asian Studies Colloquium at Harvard University.

In her Fulbright-Nehru research project, Seton is studying the collected ghazals of Insha Allah Khan Insha. She is carrying out her research in Delhi, one of the historical capitals of Urdu literary culture, in affiliation with Jawaharlal Nehru University at the Centre of Indian Languages under the supervision of Professor Muhammad Asif Zahri, who specializes in pre-modern Indo-Muslim literary culture. In the modern view on Urdu literary tradition, the genre of ghazal is limited to a narrow set of themes, characters, and settings. While it is true that this set of themes forms the common generic ground across time, it fails to recognize the many attempts to expand the genre, particularly in the 18th century. Insha is perhaps the most deliberate about pushing the boundaries of the genre, garnering recognition in the early 19th century both inside and outside the royal courts. However, his contributions to Urdu literature have largely been overlooked in the last two centuries. Through her research on Insha ghazals, which employ the use of novel settings, characters, and colloquial language particular to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, she is exploring the ways in which his literary experimentations were informed by shifting political powers, an emerging middle class, and a budding cosmopolitan culture in North India.

Harini Kannan

Harini Kannan is a student at Harvard University, graduating in Spring 2024 with a BS in mechanical engineering. Her interests lie at the intersection of engineering and medicine, with a specific emphasis on pediatrics and neurodevelopment. This is driven by her research in the following areas: development of robotic wearable systems for rehabilitation; assessing early mobility in global hospitals; volunteer work with underprivileged children in Cambridge and Boston communities; and organizing recreational programs for children with disabilities. She hopes to pursue a career in medicine and develop medical devices to help pediatric populations.

Harini’s Fulbright-Nehru project is building upon her experience working with children with cortical visual impairment (CVI) where it is difficult to identify its symptoms when it’s present alongside autism. For her research, she is working with the Low Vision Center at Aravind Eye Institute, Madurai, to develop the first autism-standardized CVI diagnostic tool and implement it. Using the currently administered assessments, she is identifying the visual skill impairments with the highest correspondence to a CVI diagnosis. She is also developing an app in the form of a mobile game to act as at-home visual rehabilitation to improve visual abilities that are impacted by CVI.

Andrew Gordan

Andrew Gordan studies international relations with a focus on South Asia. He received an AB in government from Harvard University in 2024. In 2023, he received a Boren Scholarship to study Hindi and Urdu in Lucknow, India. As an undergraduate, Andrew worked across think tanks and research centers, including the Council on Foreign Relations, the Wilson Center, Harvard’s Negotiation Task Force, and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Andrew’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is exploring the role of elite attitudes and narratives in the making of Indian foreign policy, especially in relation to India’s rising power status. For this purpose, based in Delhi, he is conducting interviews, media analysis, and archival research.

Briana Brightly

Briana Brightly is a PhD candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research centers on the intersection of religion, art, and science in South Asia. Briana’s dissertation, “The Buddhist Craftsman: Making Images during the Golden Age of Tibetan Medicine, 1600–1800”, investigates how physicians and artists used the tools and techniques of Buddhist image-making to advance medical knowledge in early-modern Tibet. In probing the production of images, rather than their consumption, Briana hopes to open up new possibilities for how scholars imagine the “sacred” in relation to the “scientific” within the context of visual culture.

Briana’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the creation of anatomical illustrations in 17th-century Tibet. In order to visualize the human body, Tibetan artists not only observed dissected corpses but also followed a highly codified system of measurement which formed the basis of religious paintings during this period. How did they reconcile these two points of view? And what can their creative process tell us about the relationship between religion, art, and medicine in early-modern Tibet? These are some of the questions that Briana is addressing at the Men-Tsee-Khang Tibetan Medical & Astrological Institute in Dharamshala, her primary site of research.