New Jersey City 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.

William Westerman

Dr. William Westerman is a folklorist, applied anthropologist, and former museum director with interests in refugees, human rights, social justice, and indigenous and immigrant communities. He has an AB from Harvard University and an AM and PhD in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at New Jersey City University, where he is also the coordinator of a program in ethnic and immigration studies. Previously, he was a lecturer in Princeton University’s writing program; he has also taught in a master’s program in cultural sustainability at Goucher College and the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York. Besides, he is a faculty member in the New Jersey Scholars Program for exceptional high school students. He has served as the director of the National Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial in Chicago and at the Drake House Museum of Plainfield. Other experiences include research and curating at the Philadelphia Folklore Project and the National Museum of American Jewish History.

Dr. Westerman’s teaching and research interests encompass immigration, with a special focus on refugee rights and the role of arts and culture in immigrant and refugee communities; ethnographic museums of immigration; indigenous rights and language sustainability; folklore and the sociology of culture; applied anthropology and social justice; and visual sociology. He is also the editor of Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. His publications include articles on applied folklore, pedagogy, museum studies, and Cambodian-American arts and culture. He is the co-author of The Giant Never Wins: Lakhon Bassac (Cambodian Folk Opera) in Philadelphia (Philadelphia Folklore Project, 1994). He has also curated numerous exhibitions, most notably “Fly to Freedom: The Paper Art of the Golden Venture Refugees” at the Museum of Chinese in America, in New York, as well as on its national tour.

In his Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, Dr. Westerman is affiliated with the Department of Cultural and Creative Studies at North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong, Meghalaya. As a part of his project, he is delivering lectures on folklore and the sociology of culture and on the practical application of folkloristics in social work. Besides, he is mentoring folklore students in their master’s and doctoral programs. He is also undertaking collaborative ethnographic research with native scholars, particularly in the areas of indigenous museums, oral literatures, folklore curriculum, and language preservation.