Host City India: Madison

Aakash Sharma

Mr. Aakash Sharma is an Assistant Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Delhi. With a master’s degree in English and ongoing doctoral research at the Department of English, University of Delhi, his scholarship is centered on the Partition of India, exploring how politics shapes collective memory and the negotiation of identities in its aftermath. His academic interests extend to cultural memory studies, the politics of representation in South Asian narratives, and post-colonial theory.

Affiliated with the University of Delhi’s Centre for Independence and Partition Studies, Aakash conducts oral history interviews with survivors of Partition. By preserving these lived experiences, he seeks to illuminate the persisting impact of Partition for future generations, viewing it not as a distant historical event but as a pivotal moment that continues to shape contemporary society and individual lives. His research, published in reputed journals, critically examines issues of representational politics in literature and cinema.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Aakash is teaching Hindi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is committed to fostering cross-cultural dialogue and deepening students’ engagement with Indian culture. He views language teaching as a vital bridge to intercultural understanding and global citizenship. Aakash intends to integrate the pedagogical insights and intercultural perspectives gained through the Fulbright program into his teaching and research in India.

Parth Dharmendrabhai Shah

Dr. Parth D. Shah is a Research Associate at the University of Haifa, Israel. He earned his BS-MS degrees in Chemical Sciences from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali and later pursued his PhD at the Department of Marine Geosciences, University of Haifa, Israel. His doctoral work focused on paleoclimate reconstruction in the southern Arabian Desert, with a special focus on understanding the impact of climate change on various ecosystem components.

Dr. Shah is the recipient of various prestigious scholarships, including the PBC scholarship from the Council for Higher Education, Israel, for his doctoral studies. During his PhD, he was also awarded the IAS 2023 Postgraduate Grant and NSF-funded Visiting Graduate Student Program (VGSP) at the University of Minnesota. Additionally, he received the INSPIRE fellowship from the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India, during his BS-MS at IISER Mohali.

As a Fulbright-Kalam Postdoc Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Shah is focusing on reconstructing high-resolution climate variability in the Western Himalayas using lacustrine sediments from Tso Kar Lake. By employing a multi-proxy approach including geochemical, sedimentological, and isotopic analysis, his work aims to understand the connections between monsoon dynamics, atmospheric circulation, and regional hydrology during the Holocene. This work will provide vital insights into the drivers of past climatic shifts, their impact on human societies, and their relevance to addressing modern challenges in climate adaptation and mitigation.

Tarun Jain

Dr. Tarun Jain is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Previously, on the faculty at the Indian School of Business, he earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Virginia. His research focuses on understanding causes and consequences of human capital formation (for instance, with education and health), especially in the context of fast-growing developing countries. Gender is a topic of special research interest given that women face persistent barriers in economic advancement. His research has received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Growth Centre, and the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, published in peer-reviewed journals such as the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Public Economics, and featured in the New York Times, The Economist, the Times of India and Indian Express. He has written for media outlets such as the Economic Times, New Indian Express, Ideas for India, The Hindu and Mint, and been a speaker for TEDx IIM Ahmedabad.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship, Dr. Jain will analyze the impact of a gender attitude change curriculum taught in government schools on the life outcomes of young adults. Specifically, he will investigate the long-term impact of the program on gender-related attitudes during adulthood, female participants’ higher education, labor force participation and age of marriage, and marital choices made by married male participants, such as their wives’ education and employment status, and the gender division of domestic work.

Indranil Acharya

Dr Indranil Acharya is Professor of English at Vidyasagar University, West Bengal. He specializes in the documentation and translation of Bengali Dalit narratives on the tragic plight of Partition refugees and the victims of Bangladesh Liberation War (1971). Survival and Other Stories: Anthology of Bangla Dalit Stories (2012) and Listen to the Flames: Texts and Readings from the Margins (2016) are two major publications in this area. He has also researched on the documentation, translation and digital archiving of endangered languages and cultures of Eastern India. The Languages of West Bengal (2019) is a seminal publication in this field. Dr Acharya has led an indigenous literary movement in Eastern India through a multilingual publication titled Janajati Darpan (since 2017).

During his tenure as a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar, Dr Acharya intends to expand the scope of his archival research on endangered folk performance traditions of Bengal- a project he had been working on since 2013. Through the translation of some critically endangered folk forms, he wants to explore the issue of graded inequality among the ex-untouchables. He would also attempt to trace the continuities of such dying traditions among the Dalit diaspora in the United States.