University of Pennsylvania Archives

Sudev Sheth

Dr. Sudev Sheth is a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Lauder Institute at the Wharton School. His research and teaching sit at the intersection of economic history, urban studies, and global business, with a particular focus on South Asia.

He received his PhD in history and South Asia studies from the University of Pennsylvania, following an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University and undergraduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Penn, he was the Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in Business History at Harvard Business School.

Dr. Sheth is the author of Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (Cambridge University Press, 2024), which examines how merchant families shaped political authority during a period of imperial decline. His broader body of work explores the role of business actors in shaping institutions, governance, and social life across time. His research has appeared in leading journals such as Business History Review, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, and Manuscript Studies. He has also written for public-facing platforms such as Scroll and the Wire.

At Penn, Dr. Sheth teaches courses such as “Global Business through the Humanities” and “The City Paradox: Design, Innovation, and Leadership”, which examine how ideas, markets, and institutions have shaped the modern world. His teaching has been recognized for its interdisciplinary approach and engagement with global perspectives.

Dr. Sheth’s Fulbright-Nehru project, “Ahmedabad’s Architects: Merchant Capitalism and Shaping a City across Seven Centuries”, is investigating how business communities have shaped urban development, governance, and architecture in one of India’s most dynamic cities. Drawing on archival research, oral histories, and analysis of the built environment, the project is tracing how business families developed institutions for credit, governance, and civic life which linked the city of Ahmedabad to regional and global networks. By foregrounding business-led forms of urban transformation, the study is attempting to offer new perspectives on capitalism, development, and the relationship between economic power and civic authority.

Rajat Ramesh

Rajat Ramesh graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in biochemistry and history. Committed to the study of both science and social impact, Rajat has conducted diverse research across biomedical science and public history – from developing chemical tools to study post-translational modifications under Dr. George Burslem to investigating the legacy of redlining and urban renewal with Dr. Brent Cebul. Rajat has led efforts within the Guatemala Health Initiative, supporting clinic operations at Hospitalito Atitlán and conducting field research to inform sustainable health interventions. He has also served as a patient care assistant at the Center for Surgical Health, helping patients access essential surgical services. Besides, he has coordinated STEM outreach through the Netter Center’s Moelis Access Science program. His community engagement includes volunteering with children with cerebral palsy and providing clinical services at a student-run clinic for homeless populations. A recipient of the Martin Wolfe Prize and the College Alumni Society’s undergraduate research grant, Rajat is currently a postbaccalaureate fellow at the NIH Vaccine Research Center, where he investigates HIV persistence under antiretroviral therapy using single-cell sequencing technologies.

Rajat’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating how electronic health record (EHR) systems can improve tuberculosis (TB) reporting in southern India, where communities face significant barriers to care and treatment adherence. The study is assessing the implementation of open-source EHRs in both rural and urban healthcare settings. Through semi-structured interviews with healthcare providers, it is exploring cultural, behavioral, and technical barriers – such as stigma and confidentiality concerns – that affect EHR effectiveness. This mixed-methods research aims to identify scalable solutions to enhance TB surveillance and reporting in resource-constrained regions of India.

Gregory Goulding

Prof. Gregory Goulding is an associate professor in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His first book, Cold War Genres, was released with SUNY University Press in 2024. His research focus is on mid-20th-century Hindi literature, with a particular interest in ideas of space, aesthetic debates, and conceptions of the international. Some of his recent articles have appeared in Comparative Literature, Modern Asian Studies, South Asia, and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

Prof. Goulding’s Fulbright-Nehru project is posing Central India as a key location in the literary history of modern South Asia, situating it as an area shaped by its political history as a borderland between Maratha, Mughal, and later British power. He is also studying Central India’s position on the periphery of three modern literary cultures, as well as its landscape of forested mountain and scrubby plateau, home to peoples who articulate radically different ideas of space and belonging. The project aims to intervene in both current understandings of modern South Asian literatures as well as in global understandings of modern literatures after the emergence of monolingual linguistic identities.

Sonali Deliwala

Ms. Sonali Deliwala graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in Spring 2022 with double majors in Political Science and Economics and a minor in Creative Writing. Ms. Deliwala has gained policy research experience through internships at numerous organizations, including the DC Congressional Office of Representative Pramila Jayapal, the Brookings Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She been heavily involved in the Philly-based grassroots organization #VoteThatJawn, working as a Teaching Assistant (for the Academically Based Community Service Course “Writing and Politics,”) a Youth Leader, and a student reporter to get 18-year-olds registered to vote and first-time voters to the polls for the 2018 midterms and 2020 general election. Ms. Deliwala has held various positions in political science and economic research, a Spring 2021 Fellow for Penn’s Program on Public Opinion Research & Election Studies (PORES), a Summer 2021 Fox Fellowship at Brookings, and serving as a research assistant for multiple Penn faculty. She was also awarded the 2019 Terry B. Heled Travel & Research Grant to document the lives of an Adivasi community in her family’s hometown in India as well as the 2020-2021 U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship. Ms. Deliwala is interested in studying rural economic development in South Asia.

Under the Fulbright-Nehru Student Research program, Ms. Deliwala is carrying out the project in the Narmada district of Gujarat, which is heavily populated by Adivasis, primarily the Gujarati-speaking Tavdi and Vasava tribes. This project will ultimately provide a critical case study of how Adivasis in India have been economically impacted by gaining land rights and offer insights into a path of sustainable development for the community.

Sriram Palepu

Sriram Palepu is a medical student with an interest in identifying and addressing healthcare disparities in South Asia. He completed his undergraduate studies from The University of Texas at Austin where he studied the heavy-metal contamination of the Godavari River. He is now a student of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. He has specific interests in HIV dermatology, gender-affirming care, and environmental health, and hopes to work in India throughout his career.

Sriram is pursuing his Fulbright-Nehru research at Mitr Clinic in Hyderabad in order to understand: the social and health history of trans, or hijra, communities in Hyderabad in terms of substance use and mental health; the extent to which trans individuals are currently satisfied with their external gender presentation; and the attitudes toward the importance of and accessibility of bodily and facial aesthetic procedures in affirming gender identity.

Priyamvada Nambrath

Priya Nambrath is a doctoral candidate in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation research focuses on the applied practice of mathematics and astronomy in the sociocultural life of medieval and pre-modern Kerala. More broadly, she is interested in the intellectual and scientific history of India with a focus on cultural encounters, archaic modernisms, patronage, and pedagogy. Language and literature, textual culture, and visual art constitute additional related areas of her focus. She is also interested in folk traditions of art and knowledge in South India, and the ocean-facing histories of the region.

Priya brings her previous training and work experience in science and mathematics to her current research interests in Indian scientific and educational history. She has taught university courses in Sanskrit and Malayalam language and literature and has published a translation of a Sanskrit play. She has also been a highly successful coach for competitive mathematics at the school level.

Under the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Priya is researching the pedagogical approaches and cultural concerns that shaped the mathematical culture of South India in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods, with a focus on the Kerala school of Indian mathematics. She is conducting archival research on untranslated mathematical materials composed both in Sanskrit and in the vernacular languages. Priya hopes that her research will contribute to increasing awareness about a plurality of scientific traditions and pedagogical strategies which can be profitably utilized in modern classrooms.

Vincent Kelley

Vincent Kelley is a PhD candidate in music studies at the University of Pennsylvania with interests in South Asian music, global jazz, social theory, music and religion, and the history of ethnomusicology. He received a BA in religious studies from Grinnell College in 2016 and an MMus in musicology and ethnomusicology from King’s College London in 2019. Vincent wrote his master’s thesis on the historical, aesthetic, and social relationships among the tabla, naqqara, and kathak performers in North India, which he is currently revising for publication. He has performed on drum set and tabla in jazz, Hindustani, and popular music settings in the United States and India. Vincent is also interested in Hindi, Urdu, and Persian languages and literature, and has received the American Institute of Indian Studies fellowship to study Urdu and the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship to study Persian. Vincent’s PhD research focuses on the political economy and aesthetics of jazz, Hindustani music, and Indo-jazz fusion in the late-twentieth century.

Vincent’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating jazz in post-Independence India through the lens of the Jazz Yatra music festivals held in Mumbai and Delhi from 1978 to 2003. The Jazz Yatra promoted the interaction between Indian classical music and jazz, and became the longest-running jazz festival in the world outside of the United States and Europe. For the project, Vincent is employing oral historical, ethnographic, and archival research methodologies to understand how pivotal economic, political, and cultural transitions in late-twentieth century India and the United States were influenced by and through the Jazz Yatra festival.

Chandni Shah

Chandni Shah graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and minors in chemistry and healthcare management. After graduation, she worked as a clinical research coordinator at Penn Medicine, where she studied and helped carry out a novel social-functioning program for adults on the autism spectrum. She focused on developing methods of outreach to diverse groups in the autism community in the hope of increasing access and equity in autism research. Chandni also has experience conducting insomnia and mindfulness research; her study was accepted for poster presentation at the 2022 Associated Professional Sleep Societies Conference and its abstract has been published in SLEEP. Research has been at the core of her academic career thus far. In fact, Chandni has been able to work on seven studies and move toward the publication of four papers (of which she is the primary author of three). She hopes to leverage clinical research to make significant positive changes in the medical field. Her hobbies include dancing, playing the violin and clarinet, and writing slam poetry.

Research studies have shown that in India, there is a significant delay between the first recognition of symptoms to the actual initiation of treatment for autism spectrum disorder (ASD); this is detrimental to the development of a child on the autism spectrum. Although scientific literature reveals these delays exist, there is little research exploring the causes behind such delays. Chandni’s Fulbright-Nehru project, while filling these research gaps, is identifying the barriers that prevent families from receiving early ASD diagnoses and interventions. She is also investigating the mental well-being of the caregivers of children on the autism spectrum.

Carlin Romano

Prof. Carlin Romano teaches media theory and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of America the Philosophical (Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage), described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “Massive, impressive and indispensable…perhaps the best history of American philosophy of the past half-century”, and by National Public Radio as “dauntingly brilliant”. He is also the editor and contributor to Philadelphia Noir, a collection of original short stories in the highly praised Akashic Noir series.

As a journalist, literary critic, and public intellectual, Prof. Romano has held many prominent positions, including being the president of the National Book Critics Circle, literary editor and literary critic for 25 years for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and critic-at-large for several reputed publications. His criticism has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Nation, the Wall Street Journal, the American Scholar, and the Village Voice. Prof. Romano has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Peking University’s Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, the First Foreign Philosophy Visiting Fellow at Fudan University, a Fulbright Scholar to Germany and Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Criticism, who was cited by the Pulitzer Board for “bringing new vitality to the classic essay across a formidable array of topics”.

As a philosopher, Prof. Romano has taught at prestigious institutions like Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and St. Petersburg State University. He is the author of the main article, “East Asian Philosophy of Religion”, in the International Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion and of an article on Umberto Eco in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.

As a pragmatism scholar, Prof. Romano is writing a book entitled Over There: The Internationalization of American Philosophy. Through the Fulbright-Nehru project, the book is extending its territory to India. Prof. Romano is also studying how Bhimrao Ambedkar, John Dewey’s most influential Indian student, shaped Indian law and politics. Besides, he is probing and analyzing modern Indian philosophy, cinema, literature, TV, and journalism to identify pragmatist elements and resonances.

Sanjeev Chawla

Dr. Sanjeev Chawla is a research assistant professor in the Department of Radiology, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. He is also a medical physicist certified by the American Board of Medical Physics. The focus of Dr. Chawla’s research has been directed toward the development of metabolic and physiological MR imaging-derived biomarkers in making correct diagnosis and assessing treatment responses to established, novel, and emerging therapies in patients with brain tumor, head and neck cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases.

He has a master’s degree in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and a PhD in radiology from Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow. He has authored 103 peer-reviewed original research/review articles and eight book chapters. He has been awarded research grants by agencies like the National Institute of Health/National Cancer Institute, the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, and the Penn Center for Precision Medicine. Currently, he is leading two clinical trials related to electric field therapy in glioblastomas (NCT05086497) and evaluation of treatment response in the case of salivary gland tumors (NCT04452162).

Dr. Chawla is also an associate editor with the Journal of Translational Medicine and a reviewer for several leading scientific journals. Earlier, he was a guest editor with Frontiers in Neurology. He has also won the Outstanding Researcher Award in Neuroradiology from the Venus International Foundation and the Leadership and Mentorship Scholarship Award from the National Cancer Institute Awardee Skill Development Consortia.

Dr. Chawla’s Fulbright-Nehru project is building a robust, reproducible, and objective clinical decision support (CDS) tool by incorporating physiologic and metabolic MR imaging-derived parameters and molecular signatures combined with machine learning algorithms for assessing treatment response in glioblastoma patients receiving standard treatment as well as novel therapies. This tool will not only facilitate accurate and timely differentiation of true progression and pseudo progression in glioblastomas (precision diagnostics) but also allow clinicians to make “go/stop” decisions on therapeutic interventions (precision therapeutics). Additionally, it will help to relieve “scanxiety” among patients and their loved ones.