Home Institution USA: New York University

Pritha RaySircar

Pritha RaySircar is a writer, poet, audio documentarian, community worker, and an artist. She uses sound, words, cartoon, collage, fiber, and food performance to tell stories of (de)colonization, economics, identity, and immigration. Her current projects use family caregiving, menopause, and spinsterhood as lenses to interrogate allowed and conventional South Asian-American stereotypes. An Aspen Words Fellow, an AIR New Voices Fellow, and a holder of the Harpur Palate Award for Creative Nonfiction, Pritha is a current MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the NYU Creative Writing Program, a poet at the Poetry Project, and studies short fiction with writer George Saunders alongside a worldwide cohort via Substack. She holds a postgraduate certificate in radio, podcasting, and audio documentary from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies; an MS in public policy from the Milano School for Public Engagement/Urban Policy at the New School for Social Research as a full merit scholar; and a BA in English literature from Barnard College, Columbia University.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Pritha is researching and documenting oral histories of sraddha habishyanno – mourning food recipes and rituals – in Kolkata, West Bengal, to create a cultural process archive for diasporic Bengalis. No such centralized, easily understood, engaging layperson documentation exists. As a writer, documentarian, and social practice artist, Pritha is preserving the habishyanno practice in audio, text and text translation, image, and video as a legacy conveyance and to spark future user-friendly diasporic artefacts. An audio documentary, multimedia installation, and spoken-word performance are also in the works. Apart from these productions, Pritha’s research is set to shape and inform an American anthology book project on hospice and mourning comfort food and ritual.

Andrew Califf

Andrew Califf is an archaeologist, anthropologist, photographer, and storyteller focused on exploring, learning, and documenting how people live and thrive in dynamic environments, specifically mountains and high-elevation plateaus. A freelance photojournalist covering topics such as environmental conservation, Indigenous rights, and archaeology, Andrew also conducts archaeological research himself, exploring how hunter-gatherers first started using the high-elevation areas of Inner Asia.

During his training at New York University in both archaeology and journalism, Andrew split time between excavations and fieldwork during the summer, and writing, photography, and reporting during the rest of the year. For his anthropology honors thesis, he surveyed and mapped stone tool scatters in Mongolia’s northern taiga while also conducting ethnographic surveys and interviews within the Dukha communities who live there. During his graduate studies in archaeology, Andrew “shovel bummed” from caves in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan to mudbrick fortresses in Uzbekistan.

Andrew has bylines from six countries and was awarded the Overseas Press Club Foundation Stan Swinton Scholarship to cover conservation and Indigenous rights in Cambodia. He aims to convey the significance of actions and a deeper worldview rooted in the Indigenous knowledge of an environment. These are the ephemeral concepts he hopes to share through both visual and written storytelling, as well as scientific research. Specifically regarding his archaeological research, the significant aspect is about better understanding how Prehistoric people navigated challenging and dynamic environments like the Western Himalaya.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Andrew is conducting a specialized survey focused on identifying Prehistoric artifacts and sites in Ladakh. The process involves combining the mapping of previously discovered stone tools with modeling geomorphological features and the topography to inform targeted surveys, thereby expanding the dataset of Prehistoric archaeology in Ladakh. This data will deepen understanding about Prehistoric peoples in one of the world’s most dynamic regions, expand India’s diverse heritage, and help researchers adopt new survey strategies for finding such sites in the mountains.

Sofya Yuditskaya

Ms. Sofya Yuditskaya is a site-specific media artist, curator, and educator working with sound, video, interactivity, projections, code, paper, and salvaged material. Her work focuses on techno-occult rituals, street performance, and participatory art. Ms. Yuditskaya’s performances enact and reframe hegemonies, she works with materials that exemplify our deep entanglement with petro-culture and technology’s effect on consciousness. She has worked on projects at Eyebeam, 3LD, the Netherlands Institute voor Media Kunst, Steim, ARS Electronica, Games for Learning Institute, The Guggenheim (NYC), The National Mall and has taught at GAFFTA, MoMA, NYU, Srishti, and the Rubin Museum. She is a PhD Candidate in Music Composition at NYU GSAS.

Ms. Yuditskaya Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on an in-depth, detailed and immersive study of global Noise Music through the lens of the remarkable contemporary Indian contribution to it. Noise Music is vitally important to understand its global forms, structures and driving forces. In today’s measured world, it embodies a fulcrum of technology, chaos, and the sublime. Living and studying in Bangalore offers her a deep insight into the ways that South Indian artists listen to and construct Noise Music. Ms. Yuditskaya aims to develop a rich vocabulary for talking about, and teaching Noise, in the framework of traditional music and in conversation with U.S. musical output.

Andrew Ashley

Mr. Andrew Ashley, a medical anthropologist and PhD candidate at New York University, studies how people live with diabetes and other chronic health concerns in India and among the Indian diaspora in the United States. In particular, Mr. Ashley is interested in the intersection of health, science, agriculture, and technology to see how scientists manipulate seeds themselves to provide better healthcare. Mr. Ashley’s work also provides a comparative look at living with Type II diabetes in India and in the United States. Previously, Mr. Ashley has conducted research on the possibilities and limits of multicultural governance strategies in a former mill town in northern England; the evolving cultural landscape of suburban North Carolina; and the complications and anxieties of life on student and temporary work visa for IT migrants from India to the United States. Mr. Ashley has conducted fieldwork on South Asian diasporas in northern England; The “Research Triangle” of North Carolina; Chicagoland; and New York and New Jersey metro area. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina; a master’s degree in Geography from the University of Kentucky; and master’s degrees with a focus on Anthropology from the University of Chicago and NYU. Mr. Ashley is also a filmmaker and a recipient of the Culture and Media certificate from NYU. His most recent film Sehnsucht (2021) looks at the shifting landscape of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the effect these layers have on him. Mr. Ashley also plans to make a film during his Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, around his research.

Mr. Ashley aims to conduct his dissertation research on living with diabetes in Hyderabad. He aims to conduct ethnographic fieldwork with people diagnosed with Type I or Type II diabetes, their family members and caregivers, and doctors and other medical health professionals and researchers. Mr. Ashley seeks to also conduct ethnographic fieldwork with crop scientists and medical researchers who are working to create new forms of low Glycemic Index rice. In particular, Mr. Ashley hopes to understand how this focus on rice echoes and also shifts previous Indian agricultural development projects since Independence; and what role crop scientists feel they have in combating this diabetes epidemic.

Shaili Gandhi

Shaili Gandhi is passionate about improving the health and well-being of underserved populations, with a particular commitment to people who use drugs, people living with mental illness, and immigrant communities. Shaili received her undergraduate degree from New York University in 2020 and completed her master’s in public health with a concentration in community health from the City University of New York in 2022. While completing her MPH, she worked for the Viral Hepatitis Program at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Health where she supported Hepatitis B and C care navigation programs. During this time, she helped facilitate a space for peer and patient navigators to stay abreast of relevant policy changes, created meaningful referral relationships, and troubleshot cases. Moreover, upon noticing a dearth of resources tailored to the South Asian community in New York, she and her colleagues worked together to develop the South Asian Hepatitis Initiative (SAHI). After her master’s, Shali joined the New York University Health x Housing Lab as a research coordinator. There, she developed her qualitative research skills by conducting an evaluation of a telephone-based nurse triage service in NYC homeless shelters. She is presently using community-engaging research methods to better understand the pathways to housing for older homeless adults. Throughout her academic and professional career, Shaili has been interested in how activism and community organizing can be used to build communities of care from the ground up.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Shaili is exploring the intersecting objectives of feminism, labor activism, and health activism through a case study of India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA). SEWA implements a health service delivery model that simultaneously serves the community and promotes economic independence for their health workers by training grassroots organizers to provide health services within their own villages. Shaili is using qualitative methods to understand how SEWA has traversed the boundary between trade union and public health without sacrificing the core components of either. Her research aims to shed light on how to build sustainable, community-led solutions to promote health security for all.